Anita Hill Research Articles

Public Opinion and the Thomas Nomination

Until recently, the nomination of a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court had little public opinion relevance. Questions might be raised about the nominee's qualifications, perhaps including his or her liberalism or conservatism, but the American people tended to acquiesce in Court appointments. That changed during the Reagan administration, when opponents of the president's choice of Robert Bork decided that public opinion did matter and effectively campaigned to turn the public against Bork.The Thomas nomination, however, raised even more questions about public opinion. Race and the role it should play in Court nominations was as important as Clarence Thomas's legal opinions. And, as soon as Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment became public, other aspects of public opinion came into prominence.

Divisions in the Civil Rights Community

Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall was the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped produce and was also a product of the 20th-century civil rights movement. President George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed him, a man who had made his professional career in a rapid succession of civil rights appointments in the same Republican administrations that were attempting to reconstruct the policies that Marshall and his successors in national civil rights organizations had created and interpreted.That Bush nominated Thomas, whose policy positions were so opposed to civil rights law as it had been legislated and implemented, did not prevent these organizations from being riven by disagreement over Thomas's fitness. When Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment became public, these organizations' opinions of the Thomas nomination became even more problematic.The nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court offers an opportunity to observe the influence and effectiveness of the civil rights lobby on an important policy question.

Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and Us: What Happened to "Us"?

Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and Us: What Happened to "Us"?

Senate Process, Congressional Politics, and the Thomas Nomination

“The wrenching testimony of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, accuser and accused, constituted a defining moment for the country that will forever change how the U.S. Senate reviews Supreme Court nominees” (Biskupic 1991, 2948). Thus did sober, factual Congressional Quarterly judge the consequences of the Hill-Thomas hearings. Most news accounts were considerably more fervid. Reporters as well as commentators claimed that the hearings demonstrated that the confirmation process is a complete fiasco.The Hill-Thomas hearings did not expose some fundamental flaw in the process per se. To be sure, a lot of less than admirable behavior and some procedural misjudgments characterized the latter part of the Thomas confirmation hearings. But a situation such as this one will always be difficult for the Senate or any similar body to handle. Structural changes in the process cannot make it easy or painless. Most of the “reforms” proposed would not work or would be counterproductive.According to a second theme in the media coverage, the hearings demonstrated that senators—at least the ones on the Judiciary Committee—are incompetent, inadequate for their jobs, and out of touch with the American people. To the contrary, I think that both Democrats and Republicans followed strategies that made excellent sense given the political context in which they operated. Incompetence is not the problem.If the simple process and personnel-based critiques are off base, was the widespread disquiet the hearings generated misplaced? There are reasons for concern but somewhat more subtle ones than those most often raised.

Race Trumps Gender: The Thomas Nomination in the Black Community

Race and gender are intimately intertwined in the lives of Black women in the United States. Race constructs the way Black women experience gender; gender constructs the way Black women experience race. In the Senate hearings that pitted the word of Clarence Thomas against the sexual harassment accusations of Anita Hill, the great majority of Black women did not believe Hill's accusations. Our analysis will set this disbelief against a background of substantial Black unity on political issues in the United States, Black feminism, television coverage of the event, and Black women's reactions to that television coverage.Contrary to the conclusion one might reasonably form from the primary White composition of all the major feminist organizations, Black women have usually given stronger support to the women's movement than Whites on surveys (see Table for self-identification as “feminist”). Even as early as 1970, 60% of Black women said they supported efforts to strengthen women's status in society, compared to only 37% of White women (Klein 1987: 26), and in 1972 67% said they were sympathetic to women's liberation groups, compared to only 35% of White women (hooks 1981: 148). Also contravening the impression one might form from the composition of feminist organizations, poor women and working class women are as likely as middle-class women to say on these surveys that they consider themselves “feminist.” The survey data are supported by indepth interviews among all classes of Black women.

Sociological explanations for failure to seek sexual harassment remedies

AbstractPublic and private debate over whether Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed former employee Anita Hill—and, if he did, why Hill would wait ten years to reveal his behavior publicly—has centered on psychological explanations of the state of mind of Thomas and Hill. This article provides an alternative sociological explanation, emphasizing the effects of gender and race in the social organization of work, and the links between workplace dispute resolution and employment inequality.

Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas

The recent struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and the credibility of Anita Hill raises in a dramatic and pointed way many of the issues at stake in theorizing the public sphere in contemporary society. At one level, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Hill's claim that Thomas sexually harassed her constituted an exercise in democratic publicity as it has been understood in the classical liberal theory of the public sphere. The hearings opened to public scrutiny a function of government, namely, the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. They thus subjected a decision of state officials to the force of public opinion. Through the hearings, in fact, public opinion was constituted and brought to bear directly on the decision itself, affecting the process by which the decision was made as well as its substantive outcome. As a result, state officials were held accountable to the public by means of a discursive process of opinion and will formation. Yet that classical liberal view of the public sphere does not tell the

Editors' Note and Acknowledgments: On Silencing Women

Editors' Note and Acknowledgments On Silencing Women / / Hfhe silence is broken, as well as our hearts," Barbara Mikulski told L· the United States Senate on October 15, 1991, before she voted against confirmation of Clarence Thomas as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.1 Only the last part of this statement is absolutely true. Although the issue of sexual harassment received more serious national attention than the Second Women's Movement could ever have mustered in this decade, Thomas's subsequent confirmation will probably have a chilling effect on women coming forward with charges of sexual harassment . The reception given Anita Hill's testimony, in contrast to that of Thomas, proves once again that women's voices are simply not heard with the same authority or credibility as those of men. Instead, sex-stereotypical views about Anita Hill's testimony (why did she wait so long?) and person (was she simply unstable or a spurned woman?) dominated the thinking of all those voting for confirmation. Had Hill charged the Senate Judiciary Committee with a "high-tech rape" of her as Thomas charged he was a victim of a "high-tech lynching," her words would not have had the same impact as his. Women's voices are simply not heard in the same authoritative way as men's, especially on issues involving their sexuality. In this fashion women are silenced even before they speak out. The silence of and the silencing of women remains a major stumbling block for obtaining full citizenship for women in the United States. These two types of "silences" are based on the fact that women in the Unites States, at least, do not speak about their legal and public needs, their private desires, and their fears honestly or repeatedly enough to be heard. And even when they do, men appear to have a difficult time listening to women's voices—both literally and figuratively. This fact was poignantly recognized in a full-page ad in the New York Times on November 17,1991, endorsed by hundreds of African-American women who, with justified anger in wake of the confirmation of Thomas Clarence as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, said: We know that the presence of Clarence Thomas on the Court will be continually used to divert attention from historic struggles for social justice through suggestions that the presence of a Black man on the Supreme Court constitutes an assurance that the rights of African 1992 Editors' Note and Acknowledgments Americans will be protected. Clarence Thomas' public record is ample evidence this will not be true. Further, the consolidation of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court seriously endangers the rights of all women, poor and working class people and the elderly. The seating of Clarence Thomas is an affront not only to AfricanAmerican women and men, but to all people concerned with social justice. 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 HUl 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 AfricanAmerican 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 the reality of sexual abuse in African 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...

The Clarence Thomas Dilemma: Nomination and Confirmation

Looking back to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, one must reconsider the entire nomination process—from Thomas's laments of high-tech lynching to senators' frustrations with his evasiveness, in order to make sense of deliberations that seemed out of control (Senators A19) to most Americans. An examination of past nominations can also help us answer the questions, What was wrong with the confirmation picture? and Whose fault was it? The Senate, that white monolith of indifference, suffered from a damaged reputation as much as Anita Hill or Clarence Thomas. The only winner, it appears, is President George Bush. Bush and the Republican Party got their man confirmed. The Senate suffered on multiple counts. First, as Senator Edward Kennedy stated, a tidal wave of anger among the women of America (Other) erupted upon the discovery that little had been done, originally, to investigate Anita Hill's sexual harassment charges. This reinforced the Senate's image of white male insensitivity. Second, the Senate was not nearly as charismatic or photogenic for Clarence Thomas as during the Gulf War debates: