It’s been more than 22 years since an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee heard Anita Hill – then a 35-year-old University of Oklahoma law professor – recount graphic experiences of sexual harassment at the hands of her former boss and then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
The new documentary “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power,” which opened on Friday, reminds us of this shameful moment in American politics.
Chaired by then-Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee members attempted to demean and ridicule Anita Hill by forcing her to repeat Thomas’ most embarrassing, graphic insults over and over again. Despite her compelling testimony, the Senate confirmed Thomas 52 to 48, the narrowest margin for a Supreme Court nominee in a century. Denying her claim, Thomas called the allegations a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”
At the time, the committee’s Democrats mistakenly felt they could not broach the subject of an African-American Supreme Court nominee sexually harassing an employee while leading the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. However, the documentary is almost certain to open this conversation again and hopefully shine the spotlight on Thomas’ calamitous tenure on the Supreme Court.
When the esteemed African-American Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall retired, President George H.W. Bush cynically nominated Thomas, an undistinguished jurist, as his replacement as the sole African American on the court. The two men could not have been more different. A liberal jurist, Marshall was widely praised for his civil rights work before taking the bench. On the other hand, Thomas was a self-proclaimed civil rights activist with liberal views during his college years. Yet subsequently, including his time on the Supreme Court, he has purposely distanced himself from the unique concerns of his people. Moreover, he has become a darling for the right and is known for aligning himself even to the right of his fellow conservatives on the court, standing reliably with the more extreme views of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Thomas has opposed decisions in favor of affirmative action, such as the 2003 University of Michigan’s law school ruling. Last year, he sided with the conservative majority to strike down a key section of the landmark Voting Rights Act, stripping the Justice Department of a powerful tool against voter discrimination. Now the department cannot require states with a past history of voter discrimination against minorities to “pre-clear” any changes in their voting procedures.
His recent comments to a group of Florida college students and faculty only reinforce the anger and disappointment towards Thomas in the African-American community. He spoke to them about being the only black student in an all-white Catholic school in Savannah, Georgia and “rarely did the issue of race come up.”
“My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school,” said the 65-year-old judge, born and raised in rural Georgia.
Critics immediately declared this as typical Thomas rhetoric. Throughout his political career, he has repeatedly claimed that race is something to be overcome by individual initiative – through hard work and not collective action.
The argument that African Americans automatically resent any black Republican is simply not true. The black Republicans who are most accepted in the African-American community are those who demonstrate a commitment to uplifting the community. Thomas is loathed by many in the African-American community because he has never been supportive of civil rights. Instead he has spent most of his professional career attacking the civil-rights measures that have benefitted him personally. His latest support of the reactionary decision about voting rights in Shelby County v. Holder sets back voting rights and helps ensure his shameful legacy. That legacy has led to Thomas being rightly called “someone so consumed with ambivalence and loathing towards his own community that he pushed himself further and further away from it until his own identity became invisible.”
And though his obsequious stance on racial issues continues to hinder our community’s progress, Thomas manages to stay out of the public light for the most part. Being quiet on the bench throughout his career, Thomas has managed to go unnoticed by most Americans. He rarely speaks during arguments or asks questions, and he declines interviews.
We applaud Oscar-winning director Freida Mock for putting Thomas and his nefarious entry into the Supreme Court back into the spotlight. We hope the documentary not only reminds us of Thomas’ highly dubious attacks on Anita Hill – who sadly has never received justice – but that it also brings a more critical eye to Thomas’ continuous judicial tampering and attacks on laws aimed at achieving greater equality of opportunity in this country.
