Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited by Toni Morrison (1993)

Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited by Toni Morrison (1993).

“It was perhaps the most wretchedly aspersive race and gender scandal of recent times: the dramatic testimony of Anita Hill at the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Yet even as the televised proceedings shocked and galvanized viewers not only in this country but the world over, they cast a long shadow on essential issues that define America.

In Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, Toni Morrison contributes an introduction and brings together eighteen provocative essays, all but one written especially for this book, by prominent and distinguished academicians—black and white, male and female. These writings powerfully elucidate not only the racial and sexual but also the historical, political, cultural, legal, psychological, and linguistic aspects of a signal and revelatory moment in American history.

With contributions by:
Homi K. Bhabha, Margaret A. Burnham, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Paula Giddings, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Wahneema Lubiano, Manning Marable, Nellie Y. McKay, Toni Morrison, Nell Irvin Painter, Gayle Pemberton, Andrew Ross, Christine Stansell, Carol M. Swain, Michael Thelwell, Kendall Thomas, Cornel West, Patricia J. Williams”

Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power (1998)

Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power (1998)

“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.”

PBS Frontline: Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas: Public Hearing, Private Pain (55 min.)

Public Hearing, Private Pain (55 min.) explores how Clarence Thomas’s bitter Supreme Court nomination hearing, replete with charges of sexual harassment, reached deep into the psyche of black America. Through interviews with prominent African-Americans, the program finds that the dynamics of race-being black in America-were inescapably at the heart of the story and that little common understanding existed in the way blacks and whites viewed the nomination battle.

Alianza Nacional De Campesinas

Alianza Nacional De Campesinas (National Alliance of Farmworker Women)  has a mission to unify the struggle to promote farm worker women’s leadership in a national movement to create a broader visibility and advocate for changes that ensure their human rights.

Their Bandana Project is a public awareness campaign aimed at addressing the issue of workplace sexual violence against migrant farmworker women in the United States. White bandanas are decorated and displayed as a symbol of the sexual exploitation of farmworker women because farmworker women have said that they use their clothes, including bandanas, to protect them from sexual harassment and assault in the workplace.

Campesinas Rising is led by Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, the first national farmworker women organization that fights for campesinas’ human rights. Campesinas Rising will raise awareness about and work towards eliminating violence faced by campesina women and girls, in the United States and globally.

Sources:

  • A Radio Model: A Community Strategy to Address the Problems and needs of the Mexican American Women Farmworkers, By Maria Elena Trevino
  • Injustice on Our Plates, Southern Poverty Law Center
  • Cultivating Fear, Human Rights Watch
  • Rape in the Fields, Frontline
  • Working in Fear: Sexual Violence Against Farmworker Women literature review, Oxfam America