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By Root 905 0

during the hearings was greatly and lastingly felt. The feelings involved were strong enough to pull together a community which had as its core women who had experienced sexual harassment but never before complained or who had complained only to find that asserting their rights resulted in greater distress. The community was held together by outrage and a deeply felt cause but had no clear outlet for either. What we now needed was policy, procedures, and accountability to deal with harassment. That was forthcoming as well. Rather than mushroom out of the hearing as the outpouring of stories had, the establishment of law and practices would evolve in a heuristic, trial-and-error manner over the next few years. But in time the strength of the community, developed during the hearing, would generate political and legal change.

At the same time that the feelings engendered by the hearing caused the emergence of one community, they threatened to splinter another. The African American community had been torn by the Thomas nomination itself, and the final round of the hearing with its allegations of racism splintered the community even further. I felt caught in the middle of the group that, though splintered over the nomination, was willing to cast me out for what was not so much an offense to Clarence Thomas as it was a breach of an unspoken pledge of solidarity to the African American community. By divulging information that was derogatory to a prominent African American, in the eyes of many I had done injury to the entire community far greater than Thomas could ever have done.

I was psychologically torn between two communities, both of which I belonged to by birth, chance, and choice. And while many members of one community embraced me, many members of the other shunned me. What we needed, in both cases, was leadership to help us to focus on the greater community goals. But for the time being none was forthcoming and I felt as though I were adrift.

Even religion turned against me, or I should say was turned against me. Thomas’ mother had been gentle in her admonition, but others purporting to speak for the church or God or both advised me to confess my sins, or worse, condemned me to “burn in hell” for my sin of testifying. Before long a few voices, speaking on behalf of a church or religion, would attempt to console me for the experience I had endured, but not before I had grown to distrust the church, if not religion itself.

At the same time, the state and university communities in which I lived and worked became the object of the political forces of the issues raised in the hearing. The very places to which I had returned to escape the racial and gender politics of Washington, D.C., became the outlet of it all. Oklahoma, the place that my grandparents had seen as a place of refuge, once again proved to be as harsh as the place from which they and later I had fled.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The immediacy of the response to the hearing speaks to its instinctive nature. It was as though the hearing touched a nerve that sent sharp pains to the stomachs of women throughout the world. That pain urged them to respond. There was no strategic plan—no complex analysis of the issue. Something from within impelled women to participate. Immediately following the hearing, demonstrations against the Senate’s action and against sexual harassment began to take place. Mostly women demonstrated against confirmation of Thomas in Washington, D.C., on the steps of the Senate buildings. In cities around the world the message of outrage was almost universal. Mostly women protested the hearing; they protested the vote to confirm Thomas; they protested the existence of sexual harassment and the insensitivity to it demonstrated by their elected representatives. In Norman and in Stillwater, Oklahoma, sites of the college campuses for the state’s largest universities, women whose activities had been long abated seized the moment of awareness—or perhaps the moment seized them. On the campus of Oklahoma University a student who had been in Washington