Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Anita Hill

Of course, the rest is history: the Senate approved Thomas’ nomination, and he sits on the Supreme Court. As the time of his SCOTUS nomination, the American Bar Association Thomas received one of the narrowest approvals in about a century. 

What can’t be quietly kept is Professor Hill’s immediate and lasting legacy: her testimony led to a very public conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace. Congress passed a federal law made sexual harassment illegal by giving victims of sexual harassment legal recourse, including pursuing back pay, damages, and reinstatement. A year after Hill’s appearance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s filed complaints about workplace sexual harassment rose 50 percent, and private companies implemented training programs to educate their employees about sexual harassment. The voters elected a large number of Congresswomen in 1992, in reaction to their witnessing how badly the Judiciary Committee fucked up during their interrogation  of Hill by questioning her character, motives, and choices instead of her claims about Thomas’ inappropriate behavior–which several people substantiated in verbal and written statements.

Hill’s testimony also became a crystallizing moment for Black feminists: a group of Black feminists took out a full-page ad, which ran on November 17, 1991, titled “African American Women In Defense Of Ourselves“:

We are particularly outraged by the racist and sexist treatment of Professor Anita Hill, an African American woman who was maligned and castigated for daring to speak publicly of her own experience of sexual abuse. The malicious defamation of Professor Hill insulted all women of African descent and sent a dangerous message to any woman who might contemplate a sexual harassment complaint.

We speak here because we recognize that the media are now portraying the Black community as prepared to tolerate both the dismantling of affirmative action and the evil of sexual harassment in order to have any Black man on the Supreme Court. We want to make clear that the media have ignored or distorted many African American voices. We will not be silenced.

Many have erroneously portrayed the allegations against Clarence Thomas as an issue of either gender or race. As women of African descent, we understand sexual harassment as both. We further understand that Clarence Thomas outrageously manipulated the legacy of lynching in order to shelter himself from Anita Hill’s allegations. To deflect attention away from he reality of sexual abuse in African American women’s lives, he trivialized and misrepresented this painful part of African American people’s history. This country, which has a long legacy of racism and sexism, has never taken the sexual abuse of black women seriously. Throughout U.S. history black women have been sexually stereotyped as immoral, insatiable, perverse, the initiators in all sexual contacts–abusive or otherwise. The common assumption in legal proceedings as well as in the larger society has been that black women cannot be raped or otherwise sexually abused. As Anita Hill’s experience demonstrates, Black women who speak of these matters are not likely to be believed.

In 1991, we cannot tolerate this type of dismissal of any one Black woman’s experience or this attack upon our collective character without protest, outrage and resistance.

We pledge ourselves to continue to speak out in defense of one another, in defense of the African American community and against those who are hostile to social justice, no matter what color they are. No one will speak for us but ourselves.

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