The Stereotypes of Race

By Jack E. White

No matter what the confusing confrontation between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill may have obscured, it left one thing clear: the U.S. is still haunted by powerful racial and sexual myths. After Hill's charges burst into print, Thomas and his supporters equated her claims with the lynchings of thousands of black men. "I will not provide the rope for my own lynching," Thomas declared at the start of the hearings; later he added that the broadcast of Hill's testimony was a "high-tech lynching" of an "uppity" black.

That was a curious choice of words from a man who has spent his public life distancing himself from racial stereotypes. But the image of Thomas symbolically dangling from a tree tapped into the pent-up rage all blacks feel at the violence and bigotry they have suffered for centuries: in this case, an appeal to racial resentments was the first resort of a black man accused of sexist crimes. To accept Hill's story, Thomas implied, was to join in a racist plot.

Thomas' words swayed many males, both black and white. The impact may have been caused in part by the fact that black women's complaints about sexist behavior are taken even less seriously than white women's. Held down by racism and the sexism of both black and white males, black females are one of society's most oppressed groups. Yet their attempts to call attention to their plight routinely provoke storms of angry denial of the legitimacy of their complaints. An example: the denunciations that were heaped on Alice Walker for her novel The Color Purple and the film that was based on it. Some critics falsely charged that Walker was a lesbian who hated black men because she created a heroine who was savagely mistreated by nearly every black male she encountered.

The tendency to dismiss black women's complaints as either exaggerations or outright fantasies has grown stronger since the Tawana Brawley fiasco. In that case, a 15-year-old black girl claimed that she had been abducted and raped by a mysterious gang of white men. It turned out that she had cooked up the story. Some feminists believe the doubts about black women's veracity stirred up by Brawley's lies may have led to acquittals in several rape cases in which the victim was a black woman.

The lowest point on the first day of the hearings came when Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter implied that Hill had simply fantasized Thomas' asking for dates and his lurid remarks about pornography. It is all but inconceivable that a similarly qualified man, black or white, would be accused not merely of lying but of imagining things. On Saturday the campaign to discredit Hill sank to even lower depths when Utah Republican Orrin Hatch suggested that she had fabricated her accusations, in cooperation with liberal interest groups, from such disparate sources as court cases and The Exorcist.

Being taken seriously was only one of the obstacles Hill had to confront in making her case against Thomas. She may have found it equally difficult to go against two other strains of racial solidarity. One is the widespread fear among blacks of "washing dirty laundry in public," for fear of embarrassing the race. The other is the strong possibility that her charges would end up derailing the confirmation of the only black George Bush would appoint to the Supreme Court.

On the other hand, race played a role in the rush to judgment against Thomas. Given the stereotype of sexually rapacious black men, it was easy for many Americans, black and white, to conclude that Thomas was guilty even before they heard Hill's testimony.

Either Thomas or Hill is lying about what happened behind closed office doors. So far, no one, not even Thomas, has suggested a reason for Hill to tell untruths about him. Nor, despite the innuendos from Specter and Hatch, is there evidence that she suffers from a mental illness that would lead her to fabricate her story.

Hill has paid an enormous price in unwanted notoriety. She testified that she had never intended to make a complaint against Thomas until she was contacted by Democratic Senate staffers, and she continued to agonize about how far she should go even after being interviewed by the FBI. Whoever is telling the truth, Anita Hill's story would not have set the stage for last week's appalling spectacle if the Judiciary Committee had initially treated her story as seriously as the Senators would have taken an equally explosive charge by a white male.