The Complete Transcripts Of The Clarence Thomas Anita Hill Hearings

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.

"This is not... the nomination of a justice of the peace to some small county in some small state. This involves the very integrity and fabric of our country."—Senator Orrin G. HatchThe transcripts of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Clarence Thomas are extraordinarily rich and suggestive. Much has been written about the hearings, but until now, no one has paid close attention to the actual language of the participants. Revisiting the words of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Jane Flax asks what we would learn about American politics if these hearings were, literally, our only text. Orrin Hatch's assertion was, indeed, perhaps more insightful than he realized. How does our legal and judicial system operate in the face of sexual issues? Can it ever transcend race and gender? Who was the real victim in these hearings—Hill, Thomas, the Senate, or the viewing public? Who in America has the power to make political meaning? Rather than attempting to establish fact or truth, The American Dream in Black and White looks at the political narrative by which our nation makes sense of itself. The senators' own anxieties about their publicly televised role were evident throughout these hearings. Given our conviction that we are a nation built on freedom and equality, says Flax, the Senate committee had no choice but to confirm Thomas, thereby validating the cherished belief that with virtue and hard work, even a barefoot boy from Pin Point, Georgia, can transform himself into a Supreme Court Justice. To have turned him down would have called into question the very legitimacy of our politics and law. To have sympathized with Anita Hill, seen as having brought "filthy" material into public view, was impossible. Demonstrating the powerful, public role of narrative, The American Dream in Black and White reveals the hearings as a dramatic challenge to the American political system—a system supposed to rise not only above gender and race, but also above any issue of sex, guilt, history, or personal identity. Anita Hill's and Clarence Thomas's conflicting accounts, Flax argues, are a measure of the stories we tell about ourselves. Drawing on feminist, political, and psychoanalytic theory, she shows how these transcripts reveal deep and serious fissures in the psychic fabric of contemporary Americans, black and white, male and female. Identity politics and abstract individualism reflect rather than repair these fissures, and the lingering discomfort with the hearings reflects the necessity of new political theories and practices.

“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.

Clarence Thomas is one of the most vilified public figures of our day. To date, however, his legal philosophy has received only cursory treatment. First Principles provides a portrait of Thomas based not on the justice's caricatured reputation, but on his judicial opinions and votes, his scholarly writings, and his public speeches. The paperback edition includes a provocative new Afterword by the author bringing the book up to date by assessing Justice Thomas's performance, and the reaction to his decisions, during the last five years.

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.

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written—the one that had established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people’s representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan “experts,” an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR’s batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court—the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language—he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas’s biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America’s future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.

From a brilliant young legal scholar comes this sweeping history of American ideas of belonging and citizenship, told through the stories of fourteen legal cases that helped to shape our nation. Spanning three centuries, Black Trials details the legal challenges and struggles that helped define the ever-shifting identity of blacks in America. From the well-known cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the more obscure trial of Joseph Hanno, an eighteenth-century free black man accused of murdering his wife and bringing smallpox to Boston, Weiner recounts the essential dramas of American identity—illuminating where our conception of minority rights has come from and where it might go. Significant and enthralling, these are the cases that forced the courts and the country to reconsider what it means to be black in America, and Mark Weiner demonstrates their lasting importance for our society.