Why Anita?

“A seasoned veteran of intense national scrutiny, Anita Hill steps into the spotlight once again to share her personal thoughts on how to weather controversy.” So a flyer reads, advertising one of several events sponsored by the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center for Black History Month.

I remember looking at the poster for a moment and wondering, “OK, so she knows about controversy . . . what does that have to do with Black History month?” Indeed, the other featured events—an exhibit on Booker T. Washington, a lecture on hip-hop culture, and a panel discussion on African Americans in the media—all seemed to have some clear relation to the Month. But Anita Hill? What role did Anita Hill play that made her so important as to occupy the keynote speaker position?

To answer the question, I had to go back to 1991, when the majority of today’s Vanderbilt students—myself included—were under ten years old. I remembered watching the hearings on TV, remembered watching that final vote, but I did not remember why it was so controversial, and why so many Republicans were frustrated by the whole event.

Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment: this everyone knows. Even to this day, though, no one truly knows what happened between the two. It will forever remain a case of her word against his. However, there are a few things we do know.

What we do know is that on September 3, an aide from Senator Ted Kennedy’s office approached Hill and asked her if she would be willing to testify against Thomas. At the time, the judge was already on the fast track to the Supreme Court, and liberal interest groups were scrambling to prevent his ascension. At the center of the storm were two Democratic Senators—Kennedy and Metzenbaum, both on the judicial committee and determined to do everything they could to prevent Thomas from becoming the only African American sitting in the Supreme Court. So they found Hill and after some period of persuasion, she agreed to testify. These are the facts of the case—confirmed by Hill herself.

The Senate hearing followed and the nation watched as Hill recounted her story, how Thomas had made several crude statements while they had been working at the Department of Education in 1981 and 1982. But she could not explain several inconsistencies in her story:why for example, she had followed Thomas to another job and why she had maintained personal relations with Thomas throughout the years. Indeed, by all appearance, she even admired Thomas: her actions in the years after 1982 were certainly not those of a woman that had been sexually harassed. In 1991, during the hearings, 70 percent of the American public believed her account to be untruthful. With all these facts considered, I had to ask myself again why the Anita Hill had been considered an appropriate keynote speaker for Black History month.

A more appropriate speaker, perhaps, would have been Justice Thomas himself, the very man that Hill tried to overthrow. It is somewhat disappointing that many journalists prefer to characterize him as a “Scalia clone,” when in fact, he has shown himself many times to be to the right of the senior judge. Noted one biographer, “By the end of the 1992-93 term, those who questioned the independence or adequacy of Thomas’s intellect either had not read his opinions or preferred to ignore or mischaracterize them.”

A second, noteworthy aspect of Thomas’s character is his intense hatred of the suspicion of black inferiority. Throughout the years, Thomas raised himself from poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, to become one of the most powerful men in the nation. And many have suggested that such achievements are what led him to outright hostility over affirmative action and other policies that treat African Americans differently. In his opinion, his race does not need preferences, and any insinuation that it does is not only racist but insulting to his own story.

As it turns out, Anita Hill canceled her speaking engagement due to an illness in the family. But one has to ask what her contributions to African American history were to begin with. These are not questions one has to ask about Justice Thomas: his contributions are not in doubt. And perhaps he should have been the keynote speaker to begin with.