by Kimberly Joseph and Ashley Anderson
In an interview back in 2002 at Stanford University, Anita Hill asked a thought-provoking question: “How do you think certain people would have reacted if I had come forward and been white, blond-haired and blue-eyed?”
Just over a decade before, Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her and creating a hostile work environment for the several years she worked under him at the Department of Justice and the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in the early 1980s. These accusations were disclosed in a private interview with the FBI–one that was eventually leaked to the press. This prompted then Senator Joe Biden to re-open Thomas‘ confirmation hearings, and Anita Hill publicly testified.
She did so in October 1991. Thomas vehemently denied her claims. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee believed him. They asked her a number of explicit questions: they wondered why she didn’t switch jobs, why she didn’t report the harassment at the time, and why she once gave Thomas a ride to the airport. Their conviction of his innocence was further realized, and Hill’s eight-hour testimony ignored, when Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court with a vote count of 52-48. He has now served on the Supreme Court for nearly 30 years.
Hill said that during the hearings it seemed “as if I had no race” because Thomas frequently brought attention to the color of his skin and likened the hearing to a “high-tech lynching.”
One might say that Hill’s question was answered recently when Christine Blasey-Ford came forward in 2018. In a scenario strikingly similar to Hill’s, Ford accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault at a 1982 house party that occurred when she was 15 years old.
Both women disclosed their experiences in private. Both were asked to make their accusations public by members of congress. Both testified in front of a predominantly white, male, and Republican committee. Neither was believed, or even had their accusations affirmed, by those who had the power to do so. Brett Kavanaugh is, along with Clarence Thomas, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
While there are a number of extremely relevant, pertinent things to be said about gender relations and the #MeToo movement, we would like to remind the public of the numerous ways race, not just gender, is an element in play here. We only partially have an answer to Hill’s question: yes, Blasey-Ford is a white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, but Brett Kavanaugh is not Black.
There are two ways race is a salient element here. The first is in public response to the accusers. Studies show that white people are seen as inherently more reliable than people of color. A recent report on exonerations showed that African Americans were wrongfully convicted at rates significantly higher than other citizens: 47% of people exonerated are Black, 39% are white and 12% are Hispanic. Studies show that charges of rapes committed by Black men against white women are sensationalized. Black men convicted of raping white women receive harsher sentences than all other sexual assault defendants. While the frequency of execution for all crimes is much higher for Black men than for white men, this difference is most stark when the crime is the rape of a white woman.
The second way race is relevant here is in the intersection of gender, race, and class. Take, for instance, the extremely believable scenario in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in which Tom Robinson, a black man, is accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Robinson is convicted despite insurmountable evidence that Ewell and her father, the town drunk, are lying (e.g. the bruising on her face is incongruent with Robinson’s dominant hand), and that in reality she had made sexual advances toward Robinson and her father beat her when he found out. The word of a low-income white woman is taken over the word of a Black man. Historically speaking, the punishment for black men accused of assaulting a white woman has always been harsh.
Remember the story of Emmett Till, a young Black teen lynched for making a passing comment to a white woman. The white men who killed him mutilated his face so badly that he was nearly unrecognizable. They were acquitted by an entirely white, all-male jury and could not be retried in 1955 when they admitted to the crime in an interview. Last year, the woman who alleged that Emmett made crude remarks and grabbed her broke her silence, admitting that her story was false. The validity of her claims makes little difference–there is no justification for the treatment of Emmett Till.
Another high profile example is the Central Park Five. In 1989, five black male teens were accused of the particularly violent rape of a white female jogger. The case is one of the most reported and sensationalized cases in recent American history; then real estate mogul Donald Trump even took out an ad in a newspaper demanding the arrest of these teens. They were eventually convicted and sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison each. They were exonerated through DNA in 2002.
Knowing that the general population finds white people more reliable and Black people are constantly falsely convicted, it is hard to not wonder if many of the convicted or murdered Black men would have faced the same treatments if they had been white and their alleged victims Black. Would these cases have resulted in as much outrage and sensationalization? Would the public have believed the victims?
Men may be believed more often than women when race is not a factor, but if we remember Tom Robinson, the Central Park Five, and Emmett Till, it would seem that white women are still believed more than Black men. So, what if Anita Hill were a white woman? Evidence shows that she might–maybe–have been taken seriously, provided that Thomas were still Black.
Kim Joseph and Ashley Anderson are students in English 291: What Is Racial Difference?