African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas

African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas
Author: Geneva Smitherman
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780814325308

An essential voice has been added to the ongoing national debate and public discourse on race, class, and gender. African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas is the first commentary on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas confrontation written exclusively by African American women. Margaret Walker Alexander, Angela Y. Davis, Darlene Clark Hine, Harriette McAdoo, Julianne Malveaux, and other scholars and writers offer reflections and in-depth analyses on one of the most wrenching public dramas in recent history. Diverse and interdisciplinary in scope, the contributions clarify the significance of the event and examine the broader ramifications for the African American community and the nation.

Believing

Believing
Author: Anita Hill
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2022-09-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0593298314

“An elegant, impassioned demand that America see gender-based violence as a cultural and structural problem that hurts everyone, not just victims and survivors… It's at times downright virtuosic in the threads it weaves together.”—NPR Winner of the 2022 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books From the woman who gave the landmark testimony against Clarence Thomas as a sexual menace, a new manifesto about the origins and course of gender violence in our society; a combination of memoir, personal accounts, law, and social analysis, and a powerful call to arms from one of our most prominent and poised survivors. In 1991, Anita Hill began something that's still unfinished work. The issues of gender violence, touching on sex, race, age, and power, are as urgent today as they were when she first testified. Believing is a story of America's three decades long reckoning with gender violence, one that offers insights into its roots, and paths to creating dialogue and substantive change. It is a call to action that offers guidance based on what this brave, committed fighter has learned from a lifetime of advocacy and her search for solutions to a problem that is still tearing America apart. We once thought gender-based violence--from casual harassment to rape and murder--was an individual problem that affected a few; we now know it's cultural and endemic, and happens to our acquaintances, colleagues, friends and family members, and it can be physical, emotional and verbal. Women of color experience sexual harassment at higher rates than White women. Street harassment is ubiquitous and can escalate to violence. Transgender and nonbinary people are particularly vulnerable. Anita Hill draws on her years as a teacher, legal scholar, and advocate, and on the experiences of the thousands of individuals who have told her their stories, to trace the pipeline of behavior that follows individuals from place to place: from home to school to work and back home. In measured, clear, blunt terms, she demonstrates the impact it has on every aspect of our lives, including our physical and mental wellbeing, housing stability, political participation, economy and community safety, and how our descriptive language undermines progress toward solutions. And she is uncompromising in her demands that our laws and our leaders must address the issue concretely and immediately.

Race, Gender, and Power in America

Race, Gender, and Power in America
Author: Anita Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1995
Genre: Law
ISBN:

The shock waves from Anita Hill's testimony at the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas continue to reverberate. Race, Gender, and Power in America is a powerful and deeply felt collection of essays that examines the context and consequences of that controversy. Edited by Hill andEmma Coleman Jordan, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and including the first published essay on the episode written by Hill herself, these essays explore the volatile politics of race and gender, and the unique challenges faced by African American women. Among the distinguished contributors are Eleanor Holmes Norton, playwright and actress Anna Deveare Smith, Chief Judge Emeritus A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals, and four members of Hill's legal team during the Thomas hearings: her lead counsel, Harvard's Charles J.Ogletree, Jr.; Judith Resnik of the University of Southern California Law Center; Susan Deller Ross, a sex discrimination expert at Georgetown Law Center; and volume co-editor Emma Jordan. Jordan's essay probes the cultural mindset of African Americans who accused Hill of "airing dirty linen" inpublic, as though by not remaining silent she had betrayed her race. In "She's no lady; she's a nigger," Adele Logan Alexander scrutinizes the devastating, centuries-old stereotypes of African American women as mindless, untrustworthy, and sexually insatiable. Hill examines the institutions ofpatronage and marriage, demonstrating how, as a professional African American woman with no official Senate sponsor, she confounded the assumptions by which lawmakers are accustomed to assigning credibility and status. "In going before the Committee, I came face to face with a history of exclusionfrom power," she writes. Charles R. Lawrence views the controversy as Act One in a three act morality play starring Clarence Thomas, William Kennedy Smith, and Mike Tyson, and Harvard's Orlando Paterson maintains that it is black men, even more than black women, who suffer the consequences ofstrained gender relations. Looking to the future, Robert L. Allen describes his encouraging work with the Oakland Men's Project, and offers a prescription for ending sexual harassment and the system of sexism that underpins it. Penetrating, bold, and ultimately empowering, Race, Gender, and Power is provocative reading for everyone concerned about the fault lines of race and gender threatening to rupture our society.

Speaking Truth to Power

Speaking Truth to Power
Author: Anita Hill
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 385
Release: 1998-10-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385476272

Twenty-six years before the #metoo movement, Anita Hill sparked a national conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace. After her astonishing testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings, Anita Hill ceased to be a private citizen and became a public figure at the white-hot center of an intense national debate on how men and women relate to each other in the workplace. That debate led to ground-breaking court decisions and major shifts in corporate policies that have had a profound effect on our lives--and on Anita Hill's life. Now, with remarkable insight and total candor, Anita Hill reflects on events before, during, and after the hearings, offering for the first time a complete account that sheds startling new light on this watershed event. Only after reading her moving recollection of her childhood on her family's Oklahoma farm can we fully appreciate the values that enabled her to withstand the harsh scrutiny she endured during the hearings and for years afterward. Only after reading her detailed narrative of the Senate Judiciary proceedings do we reach a new understanding of how Washington--and the media--rush to judgment. And only after discovering the personal toll of this wrenching ordeal, and how Hill copes, do we gain new respect for this extraordinary woman. Here is a vitally important work that allows us to understand why Anita Hill did what she did, and thereby brings resolution to one of the most controversial episodes in our nation's history.

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
Author: Corey Robin
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1627793844

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. “One of the marvels of Robin’s razor-sharp book is how carefully he marshals his evidence.... It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling.” – The New York Times Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin– one of the foremost analysts of the right (The Reactionary Mind) – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.

A Chosen Exile

A Chosen Exile
Author: Allyson Hobbs
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2014-10-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 067436810X

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

Strange Justice

Strange Justice
Author: Jane Mayer
Publisher: Graymalkin Media
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2018-05-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 163168163X

Now a New York Times Best Seller and a National Book Award finalist. Charged with racial, sexual, and political overtones, the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice was one of the most divisive spectacles the country has ever seen. Anita Hill’s accusation of sexual harassment by Thomas, and the attacks on her that were part of his high-placed supporters’ rebuttal, both shocked the nation and split it into two camps. One believed Hill was lying, the other believed that the man who ultimately took his place on the Supreme Court had committed perjury. In this brilliant, often shocking book, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, two of the nation’s top investigative journalists examine all aspects of this controversial case. They interview witnesses that the Judiciary Committee chose not to call, and present documents never before made public. They detail the personal and professional pasts of both Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill and lay bare a campaign of lobbying, public relations, and character assassination fueled by conservative power at its most desperate. A gripping high-stakes drama, Strange Justice is not only a definitive account of the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings, but is also a classic casebook of how the Washington game is played by those for whom winning is everything.

Reimagining Equality

Reimagining Equality
Author: Anita Hill
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0807014370

"Home : a place that provides access to every opportunity America has to offer.--A.H."--P. [vii]

Real Anita Hill

Real Anita Hill
Author: David Brock
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 478
Release: 1994-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0029046564

Brock's thorough investigation of the evidence in the Thomas-Hill hearings concluded that there was no reason to believe Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. Brock's book--a national sensation which landed on the New York Times bestseller list--is the definitive rebuttal of Hill's charges.