Legacy Of Slavery Essays Ascribe Outcome Of Anita Hill’s Sexual Harassment Battle To Entrenched Racism Toward African-American Women

“Race, Gender, And Power In America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings” Edited by Anita Faye Hill and Emma Coleman Jordan (Oxford University Press, 302 pp., $25)

She said he did it. He said he did not. Some believed her. Some believed him.

Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas have gone on with their lives since those days in October 1991 when the Senate and the nation were confronted with Hill’s charges of sexual harassment against Thomas who was confirmed as Supreme Court justice on Oct. 15, 1991.

To this day - four years after we sat around the national fireplace known as TV and watched the riveting Senate confirmation hearings unfold with talk of pornographic movies and pubic hair on a Coke can - if anyone were asked whether they believed Hill or Thomas, there would still be a heated debate.

However, given our times, that debate would have to get in line behind whether O.J. really did it.

In a new book of essays, “Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings,” all the contributing authors believe Anita Hill told the truth. They, including Hill, who is one of the book’s editors, tell readers why the rest of the American public should have but could not believe the law professor when she said she was harassed a decade prior to the hearings.

Through provocative, scholarly essays the book asserts that it has to do with the denigration of African-American women and the derogatory image of African-American women shaped by the legacy of slavery that snatched the virtue, morals and values of a race of women (as well as men) and tossed them aside like trash. It has to do with the white guilt and black rage evoked by Thomas’ use of the lynching metaphor to describe the proceedings, as discussed by essayist Emma Coleman Jordan. It has to do with the reluctance of African Americans to discuss taboo issues, to air so-called “dirty laundry.”

In “Race, Gender, and Power in America,” which comes out with uncanny timing given the Simpson verdict and the racially polarized reactions to it, one of the important issues raised is that when race and gender issues collide, race usually supersedes gender. For many in the black community who did not believe Hill, it was more important to get Thomas, a black man, on the Supreme Court than to deal with the assertion of abuse by Hill, a black woman.

“Many black people condemned her because she failed to uphold the ‘solidarity of the race’ - a solidarity that has been crucial in the face of this country’s longstanding and pervasive racism,” Adele Logan Alexander says in the book’s first essay.

Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a member of Hill’s legal team, writes about the importance of client-centered advocacy in such high-profile cases. A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., a former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, deals with the history of African-American women (including the rape of slaves) and how it ties to relations between African Americans and whites today: “Anita Hill was treated far more harshly by the Senate committee than she would have been had she been white, and Clarence Thomas was treated far more generously than he would have been had the victim been a white woman,” writes Higginbotham.

The book, edited by Hill and Jordan, makes no attempt to be balanced. It is an all-out rally around Hill, defending her honor, praising her courage and how she “single-handedly changed American attitudes toward sexual harassment,” according to essayist Judith Resnik. (Hill’s name on the book’s cover alone says a lot. It is not Anita Hill. It is Anita Faye Hill. She uses her full name as if it is a statement of reclamation. She is reclaiming and presenting her full self, not the one-dimensional one presented by the media.)

While the adulation for Hill would be expected from her supporters, it also is problematic. It is likely to alienate some nonsupporting readers and force them once again into taking sides and not hearing the book’s challenging arguments.

Another problem is that some of the essays are too scholarly, using lots of studies, statistics and footnotes. That said, it is essential that the writers present academic arguments rather than merely emotional ones for assertions that are likely to be viewed as controversial.

Anita Faye Hill has the last word in the book’s last essay, which is one of the most well-written and intriguing in the book. She offers a parting call for seeking solutions: “I believe that our credibility as a community turns on our willingness to address wrongs within as well as outside of it. Equality begins at home. Racial equality cannot be gained at the expense of gender equality.”

“Race, Gender, and Power in America” is an important book that conjures up the haunting realities of the past and shows readers the ghosts that will continue to stalk the present if not faced and dealt with head on.