Race Ing Justice En Gendering Power

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, Nobel Prize winner 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

"Home : a place that provides access to every opportunity America has to offer.--A.H."--P. [vii]

“An elegant, impassioned demand that America see gender-based violence as a cultural and structural problem that hurts everyone, not just victims and survivors… It's at times downright virtuosic in the threads it weaves together.”—NPR Winner of the 2022 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books From the woman who gave the landmark testimony against Clarence Thomas as a sexual menace, a new manifesto about the origins and course of gender violence in our society; a combination of memoir, personal accounts, law, and social analysis, and a powerful call to arms from one of our most prominent and poised survivors. In 1991, Anita Hill began something that's still unfinished work. The issues of gender violence, touching on sex, race, age, and power, are as urgent today as they were when she first testified. Believing is a story of America's three decades long reckoning with gender violence, one that offers insights into its roots, and paths to creating dialogue and substantive change. It is a call to action that offers guidance based on what this brave, committed fighter has learned from a lifetime of advocacy and her search for solutions to a problem that is still tearing America apart. We once thought gender-based violence--from casual harassment to rape and murder--was an individual problem that affected a few; we now know it's cultural and endemic, and happens to our acquaintances, colleagues, friends and family members, and it can be physical, emotional and verbal. Women of color experience sexual harassment at higher rates than White women. Street harassment is ubiquitous and can escalate to violence. Transgender and nonbinary people are particularly vulnerable. Anita Hill draws on her years as a teacher, legal scholar, and advocate, and on the experiences of the thousands of individuals who have told her their stories, to trace the pipeline of behavior that follows individuals from place to place: from home to school to work and back home. In measured, clear, blunt terms, she demonstrates the impact it has on every aspect of our lives, including our physical and mental wellbeing, housing stability, political participation, economy and community safety, and how our descriptive language undermines progress toward solutions. And she is uncompromising in her demands that our laws and our leaders must address the issue concretely and immediately.

Like the acclaimed film of the same title, this lyrical, lilting, densely textured novel is based on the exploits of the legendary Jamaican folk hero and reggae star Rhygin. With passion and precision, Michael Thelwell recounts Rhygin's journey from a morally coherent rural universe to the teeming, predatory slums of Kingston, his rebellion against the poverty and corruption of postcolonial Jamaica, his blazing, simultaneous rise to the top of the charts and the Most Wanted list.

This volume contains not only the complete verbatim transcript of the testimony given before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 11, 12 and 13, 1991, but, as Nina Totenberg points out in her preface, "the important exhibits that were submitted - affidavits aimed at discrediting Hill, and the sworn testimony of the so-called "other woman," Angela Wright, who had worked for Thomas and, like Hill, claimed he made lewd and inappropriate remarks to her." Wright herself was never called to testify before the cameras. But she did give telephone testimony to the committee staff - as did her friend Rose Jourdain - and that testimony is included here. Although more that two years have passed since these hearings were held, public interest remains high. With their implications for attitudes toward race, gender and sexual harassment, the issues and emotions created by the hearings are still of vital importance to literate, thinking Americans. History, someone said, is what happens before you know it. Thus, many events come clear only in retrospect. This book will at last allow the general interest reader the opportunity to develop a calm and reasoned insight into those explosive and historic three days.

A riveting behind-the-scenes look at the Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings, told by the first print journalist to break the story of Hill's allegations of sexual harassment. Based on extensive interiews and prodigious research, this definitive account of these history-making hearings presents far-reaching implications for the political landscape of our country.

The shock waves from Anita Hill's testimony at the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas continue to reverberate. Race, Gender, and Power in America is a powerful and deeply felt collection of essays that examines the context and consequences of that controversy. Edited by Hill andEmma Coleman Jordan, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and including the first published essay on the episode written by Hill herself, these essays explore the volatile politics of race and gender, and the unique challenges faced by African American women. Among the distinguished contributors are Eleanor Holmes Norton, playwright and actress Anna Deveare Smith, Chief Judge Emeritus A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals, and four members of Hill's legal team during the Thomas hearings: her lead counsel, Harvard's Charles J.Ogletree, Jr.; Judith Resnik of the University of Southern California Law Center; Susan Deller Ross, a sex discrimination expert at Georgetown Law Center; and volume co-editor Emma Jordan. Jordan's essay probes the cultural mindset of African Americans who accused Hill of "airing dirty linen" inpublic, as though by not remaining silent she had betrayed her race. In "She's no lady; she's a nigger," Adele Logan Alexander scrutinizes the devastating, centuries-old stereotypes of African American women as mindless, untrustworthy, and sexually insatiable. Hill examines the institutions ofpatronage and marriage, demonstrating how, as a professional African American woman with no official Senate sponsor, she confounded the assumptions by which lawmakers are accustomed to assigning credibility and status. "In going before the Committee, I came face to face with a history of exclusionfrom power," she writes. Charles R. Lawrence views the controversy as Act One in a three act morality play starring Clarence Thomas, William Kennedy Smith, and Mike Tyson, and Harvard's Orlando Paterson maintains that it is black men, even more than black women, who suffer the consequences ofstrained gender relations. Looking to the future, Robert L. Allen describes his encouraging work with the Oakland Men's Project, and offers a prescription for ending sexual harassment and the system of sexism that underpins it. Penetrating, bold, and ultimately empowering, Race, Gender, and Power is provocative reading for everyone concerned about the fault lines of race and gender threatening to rupture our society.