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By Root 886 0

was for the two African American women who followed me at Thomas’ office, Sukari Hardnett and Angela Wright, both of whom told of similar behavior. I felt a sense of guilt and indebtedness to them both. Perhaps if I had brought a claim against Thomas, Wright and Hardnett may not have had to endure Thomas’ behavior. I even recalled other incidents long forgotten. Once when a black female law student, who was married at the time, had sought my advice about a clerkship with Thomas, my own self-doubt kept me from vetoing the idea. I counseled her, never mentioning Thomas’ behavior toward me but suggesting that she proceed cautiously before pursuing the matter—making sure she knew what she wanted. “Perhaps as a married man, he has matured,” I thought to myself. “Perhaps he will treat her differently because she is married,” I rationalized at the time, recalling that I, like Hardnett and Wright, had been single and Thomas was recently divorced.

Despite the similarities in experiences, both Wright and Hardnett deny that what happened to them was sexual harassment. Though outwardly different, our reactions represent similar ways of dealing with the dilemma raised when black women are harassed by black men. In my own way, I may have denied the behavior, or its effects, by attempting to maintain some semblance of a cordial relationship with him to give the appearance that I had moved beyond the hurt and pain. My reaction was not atypical. After the hearing one writer, a black woman, described her experience with a black man for whom she had once worked. During an interview in his home the man, a minister, husband, and father, propositioned her and bragged about his sexual experiences with “ninety-some women.” When she tried to leave his home, he blocked her way until he heard his son’s car in the driveway. After some prodding she told her boss at the newspaper, but assured him that she “would separate [her] feelings about the man from [her] assignment and do a good story, because a good story was there and that was [her] job.” When she reported the story to her friends, they refused to believe her, and eleven years later she still refused to reveal the name of her harasser publicly. We prove we are conditioned “to handle” such behavior in order to prove that we belong to the race and to establish our womanhood. This conditioning teaches us to deny both the nature of the behavior and the harm we feel from it.

The dynamics of race, gender, and community expectations made it harder for me to sort out my responsibilities to other women who had worked with Thomas. Both Wright and Hardnett were older and better politically or socially connected than I, if not by much. Though each maintains that she was not intimidated by Thomas’ behavior, Wright’s friend recalled that at the time it brought Wright to tears and sent her away from him trembling, fearful, and angry. We all grew up in a society that tolerated harassment and in a pocket of that society, the black community, where our racial allegiance was measured by our own tolerance of it.

In our community rules against protesting harassment, domestic violence, and even rape are reinforced by the stories about violence toward and lynching of black men. The experience may hurt the individual, but disclosure, we are told, hurts everyone. “You must protest if a white person calls you a ‘nigger’ but you must not complain if a black man calls you a ‘whore,’ ” is the message we hear, despite the similarly degrading impact. The dilemma to which we are subjected results in a form of self-denial that contributes further to the degradation.

I recognize that Wright’s and Hardnett’s and my own responses can only be understood within a cultural framework. Yet I am also aware that contextualization of experience can be misused. For example, during the hearings Orlando Patterson, a sociologist from Harvard University, declared that raw sexual language was part of the courting ritual of black American males whose origins are in the rural South—a dialogue misunderstood by the kind of puritanical, white