Anita Hill is an American Hero

I’ve been thinking about Anita Hill an awful lot lately, what with Clarence Thomas releasing his memoirs and the Isiah Thomas-Anucha Browne Sanders case making the papers every day. This morning, there was yet another reason: The New York Times ran an op-ed Hill penned refuting the baseless attacks Thomas (re)launched against her in his book. I'm sure it's a tiresome case of déjà vu for Hill, having to (re)defend herself, 17 years later. And all for telling the truth.

It probably doesn't come as a surprise that I believe Anita Hill. I always have, even as a teenager in 1991. But I have trouble these days believing the media’s take on the controversy. Then and now, most coverage of the hearings has focused solely on race (Thomas’s) and sex (Hill’s), but the subtext of those grueling televised interviews was far more complex. I can't help but think that Thomas’s use of white racism – the “high tech lynching” he decried – although savvy (not to mention convenient and ironic, considering his admonishments to the black community for using race as a “crutch”), was only partly responsible for his victorious ascension to the high court. Were the “simple” issues of race and sex not further buttressed (and complicated) by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s (and America’s) (mis)conceptions about black female pathology and libidinous sexuality, the outcome might have been very different. Put plainly, if Anita Hill, who passed a lie detector test, were a white woman, the presumptively neutral coverage would have been more critical of Thomas, the public outcry likely deafening. As Hill herself once pointed out, were she "blonde haired and blue eyed," it's unlikely that segregationist (and, interestingly, miscegenationist) Senator Strom Thurmond would've so willingly accepted Thomas's version of events. While it's true that women of every race who choose to speak up about sexual harassment often suffer slanderous name calling from the usual suspects, I wonder if, were Hill white, so many people would've found (now reformed right winger and Media Matters founder) David Brock's quip that Hill was "a bit nutty and a bit slutty" so unquestioningly believable. Hill's haughty prudery – as perceived by many on the right – contrasted with who she should have been, particularly as a young African American woman. In a culture that allows Don Imus to label 18-year-old black college students "hos," John DePetro to state that white people only visit Harlem for prostitutes and Neal Boortz to say that congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's hairstyle makes her look like a "ghetto slut," it's unsurprising that Hill's time before the (all male, all white) Senate Judiciary Committee felt mainly as if she, not Thomas, were on trial – for naively expecting to be treated with respect.

I feel a tremendous amount of empathy, sympathy and admiration for Anita Hill. Seventeen years after watching the Hill-Thomas hearings on television, as an adult African American woman, I now fully understand what I only grasped then, but which Hill knew all too well – that race and sex matter in ways that can be, and often are, life defining. I've experienced sexism, racism and sexual harassment in their most overt and subtle forms, but I don't know that I'd have the bravery to suffer attempts at character and credibility assassination to prove it to an entire nation.

It's ironic that as Anita Hill is again forced to protect her reputation against Thomas's mudslinging, Anucha Browne Sanders (it's worth noting that I believe her as well) has been able to convince a jury of Isiah Thomas's guilt. It's inarguable that Browne Sanders was, directly or indirectly, inspired and aided by Hill's pioneering (to use an overused term) conviction and courage. It's just disheartening to know that Hill has to again participate so visibly in a battle she and others have already fought so many times over.