The Two Race Cards That Still Haunt Us
The Hill-Thomas movie, with those lead roles played powerfully and sympathetically by Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce, predictably has rekindled old arguments over the he-said-she-said dispute.
One of the best recent attacks against Hill comes from a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Stuart Taylor, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who covered the hearings. "(W)hile it is hard to believe Anita Hill simply made the whole thing up," he concludes, "she was far from credible."
Yet I am more persuaded by an op-ed in The Guardian by Jill Abramson, former New York Times executive editor and co-author with Jane Mayer of "Strange Justice." Based on evidence they unearthed, the authors' exhaustive probe of the Hill-Thomas saga concludes that, as Abramson puts it, "Hill was the truth-teller."
At one point the movie "Confirmation" mentions a poll that found the public to be narrowly in favor of granting Thomas the benefit of the doubt, if there were any serious, unresolved questions about his culpability.
That sounds about right to me. Men and women often fail to hear the offense in their own remarks, unless someone else tells them. Such a misunderstanding may well have happened between Thomas and Hill. They would hardly be the first.
"What Confirmation reminds us," Abramson's concludes, "is that Washington, D.C., has rarely been a place that respected women's words, or their authority. Perhaps this is the year that finally changes."
We can only hope. After the Thomas-Hill hearings, the sexual harassment claims filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- ironically the same agency Clarence Thomas directed and where Anita Hill said he had sexually harassed her -- more than doubled between 1991 and 1998.
In 1992, "The Year of the Woman," four Democratic women were elected to join the only two women in the Senate. Twenty-eight other women were elected to the House of Representatives, more than doubling their number to 47.
Hill lost her attempt to stop Thomas' appointment to the high court, but she gave a new importance to the need for men and women to respect each other's words -- and feelings.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
