Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [106]
When I worked for Clarence Thomas, he entrusted me with keeping him informed about media reports that reflected on the agency. Each morning I read five newspapers from across the country—scouring them for stories about the EEOC or the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department. I was particularly watchful for negative stories. Despite some emotional attachment to the agencies, I did not personalize the negative stories. I enjoyed comparing stories from different newspapers about the same event. Reading them and responding when necessary were part of my job.
As I sat in my room over the weekend of October 12, I was reminded of that part of my job. I attempted to keep up with what was occurring outside my room by reading two newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. I was so emotionally involved that reading the reporting was difficult—reading the opinion pieces, whether favorable or not, was almost impossible. The reporting of the entire episode had been disappointing from the beginning. It covered the allegation of harassment as a political scandal and my claim as a maneuver in a political cause. Lost was the report of the experience of an everyday person as a victim of harassment in 1982 or caught in the politics of the 1991 hearing.
Some individuals with political and legal experience worked behind the scenes talking to the senators about fairness in the process. Both Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center and Judith Lichtman of the NOW-Women’s Legal Defense Fund went to Capitol Hill daily during the hearings to help keep the Senate focused on the harassment issue. Marcia Greenberger would say later that she was never treated so well as she was by the staff of the Senate cafeteria once they discovered what she and Lichtman were trying to accomplish. But I was not in contact with either of them or their organizations, and their story, which seemed more likely to be reported, was not my story.
Though I am grateful for the work of both women and today count them both as personal friends, I confess that for me the complaint was personal and I did not want to lose that focus. I did not want to be involved in the politics of representing all women, nor did I have the energy to focus on the claim as a statement about the concerns of other workingwomen. At that point of the hearing, my interest was in surviving the immediate crises of an individual citizen who had gotten caught up in the game of Washington politics at its worst. Because it was poised to report the politics fed to it by the Republicans, the press failed in its coverage of the personal aspect of the story and only rarely made mention of the broader implications of harassment.
On Saturday night a group of Thomas’ witnesses had portrayed themselves as average everyday working women in contrast with me—whom they portrayed as an elitist, intellectual university professor out of touch with the concerns of most women. Some members of the press seemed to buy their portrait, ignoring my background and accepting without question their qualifications for speaking on behalf of working-class women. Following their lead, many of the news stories that focused on harassment tended to present the issue as a class problem. A New York Times reporter suggested that most working-class women and black women, in particular, were unconcerned about sexual harassment in the workplace.
The very thing which made them valuable in Washington, their own insularity and tendency to see everything in decidedly political terms, skewed the perspective of the members of the Washington press corps. Yet the reporting over the weekend missed the point of view of the target of harassment as well as the private citizen battling the resources of powerful Washington politicians. Few were reporting on the lack of all the protections of a normal legal process or the Republicans’ subversion of the confirmation process. The Republican