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| Anita Hill Defense Team including Charles Ogletree, Janet Napolitano & Kimberle Crenshaw |
A Tale of Two Publics:
Reflections on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Hearings
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackManTwenty-years ago when Professor Anita Hill testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, investigating sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, I was in my first semester in graduate school. Twenty-years later I recall those hearings as a foundational moment in my development as a feminist. As is so often the case with Blackness, the hearings resonated in contemporary American culture for years to come—largely as spectacle—continuing to frame many of our conversations about sexual harassment in the work place. Few in mainstream American culture seemed inclined to believe Professor Hill’s claim that she was harassed; Justice Thomas was confirmed in the closet vote in the history of Supreme Court confirmations. Yet such sentiment seemed even more palpable within Black publics, or what political scientist Lester Spence, Jr. calls the Black Parallel Public.
In her book Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character, literary and legal scholar Karla FC Holloway, notes that Professor Hill’s testimony “captures the visual and spoken dimension of a testimony of exile…the inquisition of her body and the interrogation of her words demonstrated the displaced subjectivity of an altered state of black identity.” Considered another way, Holloway’s comments capture the distinctly different ways that the Hill-Thomas hearings were consumed along racial, gendered and class lines. Most in White America were not privy to the rich and raucous debates over gender that raged in Black publics; that the Hill-Thomas hearings raised the ante in the form of public spectacle only highlights that for Black America, it was never simply about Justice Thomas replacing retired Justice Thurgood Marshall as the high court’s “Black” justice.
The Hill-Thomas hearings came on the heels of several high profile controversies regarding black female and male relations. Debates about Black gender politics became particularly virulent after the publication and subsequent film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. When the film premiered in December of 1985, journalist and talk-show host Tony Brown—who hadn’t read the book or seen the film—famously decried, “I know that many of us who are male and black are too healthy to pay to be abused by a white man’s movie focusing on our failures,” helping to spearhead public protests at the film’s screenings.
A few years later, as heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson rose to the pinnacle of his sport, his marriage to actress Robin Givens established them as the first Black celebrity couple of the digital era—before Bobby and Whitney, Will and Jada, Beyonce and Shawn. Tyson and Givens’ train-wreck of a relationship reached its most critical moment during a prime-time interview with Barbara Walters, where Givens admitted that Tyson physically abused her, while a contrite—and heavily medicated—Tyson simply nodded his head. Black public opinion though, focused not on Tyson’s abuse—let a man, be a man, right?—but rather on Givens and her mother Ruth Roper, who were easily cast as duplicitous Black women aiming to undermine Tyson (and take his money), and by extension, Black patriarchy. Givens and Roper’s ultimate crime was the airing of Tyson’s dirty laundry, a charge that resonated powerfully with some Black publics during the Hill-Thomas hearings.
Finally there was the case of Denise “Dee” Barnes, then host of the weekly music video program, Pump It Up. Members of the group N.W.A., then led by producer Dr. Dre (Andre Young) and the late Eazy-E (Eric Wright), took offense when they perceived Barnes as allowing former NWA member Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson) to sleight them during her interview with him. Rather than physically confront Ice Cube over his comments—they would famously exchange barbed lyrics instead—Dr. Dre confronted Barnes at an industry party and assaulted her, while his bodyguards kept on-lookers away. Occurring ten months before the Hill-Thomas hearings, the incident is perhaps most notable for the lack of response it generated, both within hip-hop circles and Black communities at large. The silence led feminist writer and critic Pearl Cleage to opine, “There had been no outcry from the black women writers (including me) who are old enough to be [Barnes’] mother and who have participated in vocal and sustained defenses of sisters Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange and Gloria Naylor when they were attacked by black men for creating ‘negative images.’”
Providing a finer perspective, Cleage further queries, “What if Amiri Baraka had taken physical issue with Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls… and punched her out at a reading at Oxford Bookstore?” Unspoken, yet clearly heard in Cleage’s observations is that fact that within a politics of Black respectability, where airing dirty laundry is a capital offense, often deserving or social death, the silence associated with Barnes’ assault, as well as the castigation of Walker, Givens and Roper, was a policing function, that would have ramifications as Professor Hill sat in judgment (as opposed to Thomas) in October of 1991. Cleage’s own work was in response to the popularity of Shaharazede Ali’s self-published pamphlet, The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwomen, which literally advocated hitting black women in the mouth for daring to speak critically about Black men. While White America was oblivious to Ali (though the publishing industry would take notice), she was viewed in far too many Black publics as a trusted arbiter of Black gender relations.
Justice Thomas and his advisors clearly understood these dynamics, mounting a response that tapped into centuries’ old narratives about violence and Black masculinity. Thomas’s invocation that the hearings functioned as a “high tech lynching” represented a specific gendered reference to racial violence that displaced the reality of gendered and racialized violence against Black women. As Johnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall argue in their book Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, for many in Black communities, Thomas, “became yet another example of a Black man targeted by the system presumably for sexual crimes he did not commit,” adding that “Hill could not mobilize the Black community, including women, against a successful Black man for the ‘lesser’ crime of sexual harassment—even if they were willing to acknowledge that Thomas was guilty.”
Thomas’s invoking of a “high tech lynching” is also a critical signpost of the emerging digital era. In his book In Search for the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era political scientist Richard Iton notes that the burgeoning digital era of the late 1980s and early 1990 was marked by a hypervisibility of Blackness, tantamount to forms of surveillance. What the Hill-Thomas hearings made clear was that notions of Black sexual pathology, even amongst middle class figures like Professor Hill and Justice Thomas, would be intimately tethered to the new digital landscape. ABC and NBC’s prime-time coverage of the hearings—on a Friday evening—drew a 40% television share, practically portending the coming of the 24-hour-news cycle.
The impact of the Hill-Thomas hearings could be witnessed seven years later, when Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky became public. That many viewed such a relationship as a form of coercion on the part of the Commander-in-Chief was largely due to the ways that Anita Hill’s charges against Clarence Thomas altered the ways mainstream America viewed sexual discrimination and harassment in the work place.
Not surprisingly, such resonances were not quickly reflected within some Black publics, if we are to gauge responses to Mike Tyson’s rape trial and his subsequent conviction, the R Kelly rape trial and subsequent dismissal, the “Tip Drill” protest at Spelman College and the Duke Lacrosse case, where conventional wisdom placed focus on the culpability of the black women and girls involved. As political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry observes in her book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America, these cases “hint at the continuing power of a common stereotype of black women as particularly promiscuous and sexually immoral,” adding that “while the myth of black women’s hypersexuality may have been historically created and perpetuated by white social, political and economic institutions, it’s contemporary manifestations are often seen just as clearly in the internal politics of African-American communities.”
