A Tale of Two Publics: Reflections on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Hearings

Anita Hill Defense Team including Charles Ogletree, JanetNapolitano & Kimberle Crenshaw 


















ATale of Two Publics:    Reflectionson the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Hearings byMark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

Twenty-yearsago when Professor Anita Hill testified in front of the Senate JudiciaryCommittee, investigating sexual harassment charges against Supreme Courtnominee Clarence Thomas, I was in my first semester in graduate school.  Twenty-years later I recall thosehearings as a foundational moment in my development as feminist. As is so oftenthe case with Blackness, the hearings resonated in contemporary Americanculture for years to come—largely as spectacle—continuing to frame many of ourconversations about sexual harassment in the work place. Few in mainstreamAmerican culture seemed inclined believe Professor Hill's claim that she washarassed; Justice Thomas was confirmed in the closet vote in the history ofSupreme Court confirmations. Yet such sentiment seemed even more palpablewithin Black publics, or what political scientist Lester Spence, Jr. calls the BlackParallel Public.
Inher book Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics,and the Color of Our Character, literary and legal scholar Karla FCHolloway, notes that Professor Hill's testimony "captures the visual and spokendimension of a testimony of exile…the inquisition of her body and theinterrogation of her words demonstrated the displaced subjectivity of analtered state of black identity." Considered another way, Holloway's comments capture the distinctlydifferent ways that the Hill-Thomas hearings were consumed along racial,gendered and class lines.  Most inWhite America were not privy to the rich and raucous debates over gender thatraged in Black publics; that the Hill-Thomas hearings raised the ante in theform of public spectacle only highlights that for Black America, it was neversimply about Justice Thomas replacing retired Justice Thurgood Marshall as thehigh court's "Black" justice.
TheHill-Thomas hearings came on the heels of several high profile controversiesregarding black female and male relations. Debates about Black gender politicsbecame particularly virulent after the publication and subsequent filmadaptation of Alice Walker's novel TheColor Purple.  When the film premieredin December of 1985, journalist and talk-show host Tony Brown—who hadn't readthe book or seen the film—famously decried,  "I know that many of us who are male and black are toohealthy 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.
Afew years later, as heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson rose to the pinnacle of hissport, his marriage to actress Robin Givens established them as the first Blackcelebrity couple of the digital era—before Bobby and Whitney, Will and Jada,Beyonce and Shawn.  Tyson andGivens' train-wreck of a relationship reached its most critical moment during aprime-time interview with Barbara Walters, where Givens admitted that Tyson physicallyabused her, while a contrite—and heavily medicated—Tyson simply nodded hishead.   Black public opinion though, focused not on Tyson's abuse—leta man, be a man, right?—but rather on Givens and her mother Ruth Roper, whowere easily cast as duplicitous Black women aiming to undermine Tyson (and takehis money), and by extension, Black patriarchy.  Givens and Roper's ultimate crime was the airing of Tyson'sdirty laundry, a charge that resonated powerfully with some Black publicsduring the Hill-Thomas hearings.
Finallythere was the case of Denise "Dee" Barnes, then host of the weekly music videoprogram, Pump It Up.   Members of the group N.W.A., thenled by producer Dr. Dre (Andre Young) and the late Eazy-E (Eric Wright), tookoffense when they perceived Barnes as allowing former NWA member Ice Cube (O'SheaJackson) to sleight them during her interview with him.  Rather than physically confront IceCube over his comments—they would famously exchange barbed lyrics instead—Dr.Dre confronted Barnes at an industry party and assaulted her, while hisbodyguards kept on-lookers away.  Occurring ten months before the Hill-Thomas hearings,  the incident is perhaps most notable forthe lack of response it generated, both within hip-hop circles and Blackcommunities at large.  The silenceled feminist writer and critic Pearl Cleage to opine, "There had been no outcryfrom the black women writers (including me) who are old enough to be [Barnes']mother and who have participated in vocal and sustained defenses of sistersAlice Walker, Ntozake Shange and Gloria Naylor when they were attacked by blackmen for creating 'negative images.'" 
Providinga finer perspective, Cleage further queries, "What if Amiri Baraka had takenphysical issue with Ntozake Shange's play ForColored Girls… and punched her out at a reading at Oxford Bookstore?"Unspoken, yet clearly heard in Cleage's observations is that fact that within apolitics of Black respectability, where airing dirty laundry is a capitaloffense, often deserving or social death, the silence associated with Barnes'assault, as well as the castigation of Walker, Givens and Roper, was a policingfunction, that would have ramifications as Professor Hill sat in judgment (asopposed to Thomas) in October of 1991. Cleage's own work was in response to thepopularity of Shaharazede Ali's self-published pamphlet, The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwomen, whichliterally advocated hitting black women in the mouth for daring to speak criticallyabout Black men.  While WhiteAmerica was oblivious to Ali (though the publishing industry would takenotice), she was viewed in far too many Black publics as a trusted arbiter ofBlack gender relations.
JusticeThomas and his advisors clearly understood these dynamics, mounting a responsethat tapped into centuries' old narratives about violence and Blackmasculinity. Thomas's invocation that the hearings  functioned as a "high tech lynching" represented a specificgendered reference to racial violence that displaced the reality of genderedand racialized violence against Black women.  As Johnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall argue in theirbook Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women'sEquality in African American Communities,  for many in Black communities, Thomas, "became yet anotherexample of a Black man targeted by the system presumably for sexual crimes hedid 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 werewilling to acknowledge that Thomas was guilty."
Thomas'sinvoking of a "high tech lynching" is also a critical signpost of the emergingdigital era.  In his book In Search for the Black Fantastic: Politicsand Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era political scientistRichard Iton notes that the burgeoning digital era of the late 1980s and early1990 was marked by a hypervisibility of Blackness, tantamount to forms of surveillance.  What the Hill-Thomas hearings madeclear was that notions of Black sexual pathology, even  amongst middle class figures likeProfessor Hill and Justice Thomas, would be intimately tethered to the newdigital landscape.  ABC and NBC'sprime-time coverage of the hearings—on a Friday evening—drew a 40% televisionshare, practically portending the coming of the 24-hour-news cycle.
Theimpact of the Hill-Thomas hearings could be witnessed seven years later, whenBill Clinton's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky becamepublic.  That many viewed such arelationship as a form of coercion on the part of the Commander-in-Chief waslargely due to the ways that Anita Hill's charges against Clarence Thomasaltered the ways mainstream America viewed sexual discrimination and harassmentin the work place.
Notsurprisingly, such resonances were not quickly reflected within some Blackpublics, if we are to gauge responses to Mike Tyson's rape trial and hissubsequent conviction, the R Kelly rape trial and subsequent dismissal, the "TipDrill" protest at Spelman College and the Duke Lacrosse case, whereconventional wisdom placed focus on the culpability of the black women andgirls involved.  As politicalscientist 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 womenas particularly promiscuous and sexually immoral," adding that "while the mythof black women's hypersexuality may have been historically created andperpetuated by white social, political and economic institutions, it'scontemporary manifestations are often seen just as clearly in the internalpolitics of African-American communities."