Diary of a Mad Law Professor by
Patricia J. Williams: Speaking Truth to Soundbites
I've been reading Anita Hill's new book,
Speaking Truth to Power. Happily, it is a
compelling, intelligent read--indeed, in the
rushing river of recent celebrity-lawyer
publications, from Marcia Clark to Robert Bork,
from Alan Dershowitz to Johnnie Cochran, this one
stands out. It offers a fascinating insight into
not only Hill's life but also that of her parents
and grandparents. It's not just about the battle
she waged with the Senate; it's about the social
history of rural black America and the entire
region in which she grew up. At the same time, I've been watching the public
response to this book. I've been listening to the
television interviews and reading the reviews--not
bad but thin, as though like lazy schoolchildren
they'd only skimmed the assignment. They all ask
the same four questions: Why did you write this
book now? (She was tired of others characterizing
her.) Would you testify again? (Yes. It was a
matter of principle.) What do you think about
Clarence Thomas now? (General disappointment.) Any
regrets? (Aside from the death threats and losing
her job, no, none whatever.) But the book is anything but soundbitten rehash.
To me, the most interesting aspect of Speaking
Truth to Power is Hill's exploration of the tension
in living one's life in a world so invested in its
images of race and gender. Hill examines all the
ingredients that made the hearing such a spectacle:
The drawing of that ever-so-reasonable "I said no"
line in the sand has never been a simple affair
under the best of circumstances. Add to that the
fear of the do-gooder tattle, which is, after all,
at the heart of the ambivalence surrounding any
whistleblower. Such a brew requires only a pinch of
race, but this was like one of those culinary
catastrophes where the cap came off and the whole
jar fell in. Serve it up to a pack of
red-meat-eating Real Hungry Men,and let the feeding
frenzy begin. "She will be injured and destroyed and belittled
and hounded and harassed, real harassment,
different from the sexual kind, just plain old
Washington-variety harassment," then-Senator Alan
Simpson announced publicly. And so it was indeed.
Hill's book details the remarkable thoroughness of
the Bush White House's attempt to smear her at all
costs--from the insinuation of a conspiracy with
feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon, whom she had
never met, to (senatorially subsidized?) campaigns
to solicit letters of complaint from students she
had never taught. Much of this effort has already
been documented by no less an authority than former
Senator John Danforth. In his book Resurrection, he
apologized for the abuses to which he, in a
self-proclaimed frenzy of religious conviction, was
propelled in pursuit of what he still deems to have
been God's mission for his friend and mentee
Clarence Thomas. And in considerably calmer tones,
veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Jill Abramson
and Jane Mayer have independently recounted the
F.B.I.'s unauthorized search for "dirt" about Hill
in their book Strange Justice. (Although I must say
that my favorite revelation from Mayer and
Abramson's investigation is that the organization
known as the "African-American Freedom Alliance"
was in fact a group of white fundamentalists who
advertised under that name in the black press.) Public opinion has changed since 1991. These
days more people believe Anita Hill. Yup, it
probably happened, runs the popular commentary--but
it wasn't harassment. They keep skipping over that
part where Hill alleges Thomas ignored her work,
stopped being her mentor and compromised her job
prospects. Instead everyone's debating whether it
wasn't just a bit of amorous wordplay, a
Rabelaisian flirtation. Even Hollywood, home of the
casting couch, has spent millions proving that, lo
and behold, women can be harassers too! So since
we're all equal now, here's what you do: Dry your
tears and forget about it! Chin up, blow your nose
and join the boys for a beer. They keep skipping over that part where she
says, repeatedly and very clearly, that he
compromised her ability to do her job. "I thought
that once I left that place I could get those
things that normal people got when they had done
well," Hill told me in a recent interview. "That
makes for a difficult balance between forgetting
about it and not making harassers responsible. Just
leaving Washington didn't stop it. It is really
difficult, because people do think that leaving a
bad situation with your dignity intact means
washing your hands of the entire thing and just
walking off. I did not realize how sinister the
control was, and that it was really all about
control." Control. The sentiment runs like an underground
river, a small sound, an ominous rush of circular
denials and crushing resentment. She asked for it,
don't you know, she stayed, and besides, will you
look at what she was wearing. It's the kind of
assumption that booby-traps a lot of women, if on a
smaller scale. "I lay claim to my rights as a
chauvinist any day," says a journalist friend of
mine. "But what really gets me is all these guys I
interview who say Marv Albert couldn't be guilty
because he and this woman had known each other for
ten years." Hill says: "One of the things I've had to deal
with is that people create their own
[realities] of who I should be. There were
a lot of people, well-intentioned people, after the
hearing who wanted me to come out and...make these
bold statements and denounce this person or that,
and demand that Clarence Thomas resign...and that's
not the person that I am. And then there were all
these other people, the David Brocks, who wanted me
to be this completely flaky, incompetent person
and/or this totally sexually aggressive person. I
think people's willingness to accept these versions
of things ties in a lot to preconceived notions we
have about black women, but I think that there are
also some preconceived notions we have about people
who care about issues. The reality is often
difficult for people on both sides to accept." I hope she is heard--and read--in this world of
embattled bigmouths uttering small words, the
hissing yes's so often drowning out the no's. Source: The
Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1997 History 122