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Event analyzes roles of race, gender in testimonies against Supreme Court nominees

Anita Hill’s congressional testimony against Clarence Thomas is the topic of the documentary “Anita,” which was screened at the Hammer Museum on Tuesday night and accompanied by a discussion between UCLA professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and author Rebecca Traister.
(Creative Commons photo by Gage Skidmore via flickr)

By Olivia Mazzucato

Feb. 6, 2019 5:42 p.m.

The rage of vulnerable populations is often stoked when injustice is made visible, said author Rebecca Traister.

Such was the case with the congressional testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford.

Tuesday night, the Hammer Museum hosted “Speaking Truth to Power: From Thomas to Kavanaugh,” which featured a screening of the documentary “Anita,” followed by a conversation between UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and Traister. The two discussed their personal connections to the hearings, the complexity of race and identity in Hill’s hearing, and the legacy of the confirmations moving forward.

Hill testified in 1991 and Ford testified in 2018, both before the Senate Judiciary Committee about alleged sexual misconduct of nominees to the United States Supreme Court – Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, respectively. Despite the highly contentious nature of the hearings, ultimately, both Thomas and Kavanaugh were confirmed, and both men currently sit on the Supreme Court today, said Hammer director of public programs, Claudia Bestor.

The Hammer event happened to coincide with the State of the Union address, which Bestor pointed out in her introduction. She also said many in the audience likely had strong feelings about the confirmation hearings – the event had sold out, with audience members in a second viewing room to watch a livestreaming of the event.

“Tonight is a chance to review these cases and maybe to vent a little bit too,” Bestor said. “Because I don’t know how you all feel, but I feel very, very, very angry about how these women were treated and how victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence are still to this day dismissed, ignored, disregarded, mocked and even villainized.”

The audience then watched the 2013 documentary “Anita,” which follows the events of the 1991 Thomas confirmation hearing, guided by interviews with Hill herself, as well as members of her family and legal team and journalists who covered the story.

Following the screening, Crenshaw and Traister discussed their personal experiences with the hearings. Crenshaw had served on Hill’s legal team and remembered her confusion when Democrats failed to defend Hill from particularly harsh lines of questioning, expecting more from them, she said.

“I didn’t get why they weren’t on her side,” Crenshaw said. “The thing about being disillusioned is you don’t realize you were illusioned until you lose it.”

Traister, on the other hand, said she was a teenager who had a grown up in a liberal environment, watching the hearings with her conservative grandparents in rural Maine. She said she struggled to reconcile her own thoughts and the highly negative reactions of her grandparents – a fact that she believes has led her to repeatedly write about Hill’s testimony in her books, still trying to unravel her initial mental conflict.

The two then talked about the complex role of identity in Hill’s hearing. The framework of the hearings was partially constructed and obscured by color-blind feminism – an insistence that Hill’s case dealt only with gender and not with race, Crenshaw said.

“When he was able to say, ‘This is a high-tech lynching for black men who think for themselves,’ he is able at that moment to galvanize the support … and basically pull the racial solidarity rug away from Anita Hill,” Crenshaw said.

Nearly 27 years later, Ford’s testimony served as a reinforcement of many of the observations gleaned from Hill’s testimony, Traister said. Ford was everything that Hill was not – a white, married woman from an elite background, she said. However, Traister also said Hill’s experience was ultimately discounted, either by disbelief or ambivalence. Traister said she believes that the committee believed Ford, but the Republicans chose to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination anyway, sending a message of what was acceptable.

One common thread between the two hearings that Traister pointed out was the presence of anger and who was allowed to display it. Traister, who most recently wrote the book “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger,” said that watching the documentary, she recognized the same display of gritted rage in Thomas as she had seen in Kavanaugh’s loud outbursts.

“The expression of anger and who’s permitted to express it and how the expression of anger intersects with who has power in a given situation and on whose behalf you’re being angry,” Traister said. “Anita Hill had to be precise, polite, even-toned, solicitous – she was already treated as a disruptive, violent, disorderly body and so everything in her tone and demeanor had to be restrained, controlled and unthreatening.”

When considering change from 1991 to 2018, Crenshaw and Traister both said they believe a direct line could be drawn from Thomas to Kavanaugh. According to Traister, Thomas became a deciding vote in a case that gutted the Voting Rights Act, which in turn created the electoral circumstances for Donald Trump to win office and nominate Kavanaugh to the court. Audience members also considered the modern-day implications of the nominations. When one college student asked about proposed changes to Title IX, Crenshaw identified the changes as an example of the consequences of elections. The president tends to appoint like-minded individuals, raising the need for sustained organization and attention, she said.

“I just hope that that level of righteous indignation about it continues,” Crenshaw said. “We’ve got two more years in which (there is) the possibility that that steam gets lost … so we’ve got big fights ahead.”

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Olivia Mazzucato
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