Hill's Potential Stunted By Gender-Focused Politics
WITH great dignity and gravity, Anita Hill gave a peculiar speech marking the anniversary of the Hill-Thomas hearings.
She gave it at a Georgetown University Law Center conference on "Race, Gender and Power in America." As the title implies, this was one of those hothouse campus meetings where no male Caucasian is on the program, and if one is even spotted in the audience, he could fairly be accused of masochism.
Amid all the talk about "marginalization" and "abnormalization," white males took the customary drubbing. "Most of white men's lives are predicated on ignoring injuries done to women," intoned law professor Judith Resnick in one of the minor indignant sallies against the low-pigment, high-testosterone set.
An awkward moment occurred when someone from the audience suggested that the panelists might be stereotyping white males. This is like a seminarian telling the pope he might be wrong about the virgin birth. But no punitive action was taken against the zany questioner and the crisis quickly passed.
After some brief mumbling about a variety of opinion among white males, panelists were back on firm ground once again, talking about "structures of subordination" and the need for a "gender-focused political movement."
Given the fiery tone of the conference, Anita Hill's speech must have come as a disappointment. She threw no red meat to the audience. She did not mention Clarence Thomas' name. Even a reference in her printed text to "the press, Thomas supporters and Thomas witnesses" was shortened to "the press and others" when she spoke.
Instead, she delivered a dry speech, based on an abstract and heavily footnoted paper, mentioning Sigmund Freud and Simone de Beauvoir. Her central argument was that much of the public failed to believe her accusations against Clarence Thomas because she was unmarried and had no protector/patron among the "14 white male" members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She called this her "failure and unwillingness" to tap into the "institutions" of patronage and marriage. At oppression conferences, everything is an "institution," but little applause is heaped upon speakers who lament the lack of white male protectors.
Hill was apparently complaining, as indirectly as possible, that she had nothing resembling the hometown support that Clarence Thomas got from Sen. John Danforth. She says her "sin" was not acquiring patronage before the Senate hearings began. She said: "I thus wandered into Washington, D.C., without a patron or even a proper letter of introduction and with no good explanation of how I came to be there."
This is a puzzling passage. Hill's testimony was backed and praised by powerful Washington lobbying groups. Allies and witnesses rallied to her side. She says the presence of her family during the hearings had a telling effect. Yet a year later, she presents herself as a lonely wanderer in Washington.
Whatever one thinks of Hill's testimony, this is an odd way of casting the story. The Hill-Thomas hearings were a momentous political and social event, with repercussions in gender relations, race relations and partisan politics we still can't measure. Among other things, it was the first national teach-in on the charge of sexual harassment, and the first time (outside a sports arena) that large masses of white Americans fully identified themselves with the personal struggle of black Americans.
But at a conference built around her, Hill reduced the political to the narrowly personal, going on at some length about how the committee failed to understand her as a person. Here she is talking about her status as a single woman:
"The attention to my marital status caused people to ponder in an uninformed way as to why I, a 35-year-old black professional woman, was single . . . Yet to consider the question of my marital status in an informed way, the public would have had to consider the institution of marriage in the context of a number of factors, modern and historical, as they relate to the lives of African Americans."
Say what? Couldn't she just have said plainly that (1) her marital or non-marital status is nobody's business, and (2) Sen. Alan Simpson is a sleaze for talking about her sexual "proclivities"?
Hill spoke moderately, but she adopted the intellectual apparatus of those who view all world events through the race-and-gender prism. She ignored the partisan political hardball at the hearings, and shifted the focus away from the alleged black perpetrator to what the white patriarchal superstructure did to her. And she did this using the language of conventional campus deconstruction theory ("Because I and my reality did not comport with what they accepted as their reality, I and my reality had to be reconstructed . . .").
The reality is that Hill could become a major voice on harassment issues. She is on leave from her law school to study sexual harassment, and she may be given the world's first endowed professorship in sexual harassment, at the University of Oklahoma. Since she will have a lot to say, her apparent embrace of the race-and-gender ideologues is not a good sign. John Leo is a contributing editor to U.S. News and World Report.
(Copyright, 1992, John Leo)