Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [139]
The invocation of cultural excuses for gender subordination and abuse is not only a distortion of community mores, it is a manipulative excuse for illegal behavior. Patterson’s theory represents the unscientific way in which the larger community often deals with ethnic culture—substituting myth for fact, mimicking for analysis, but in essence only validating prejudice. Thus, rank gender subordination, a subtext in our community, continues because of the fear of racism. Unfortunately, that subtext is becoming more and more the main theme as portrayed in popular culture as violence against black women by black men increases, as it does in society in general.
A community standard which requires that women “toughen up to” gender abuse for the sake of the community creates a complex set of dilemmas. Particularly where toughness requires her to participate in her own denigration, she loses her individual dignity. A requirement that she show her toughness by not protesting such behavior places her at odds with other more broadly accepted definitions of feminine traits and makes her responsible for ending the behavior. In sum, it encourages a dangerous and vicious cycle of abuse.
As I sat about piecing together the role of social and cultural perception in the events of 1991, I knew that I must look beyond the simple facts and the pat explanations to the broader issues and deeply held presumptions. I even looked to history for a present-day explanation, believing that any society is a total of our experience past and present. In our slave history black women in America experienced the economic exploitation of their sexuality. Even before the law prohibited importing slaves into the country, slave owners saw procreation as a way of increasing the number of new slaves in their holdings. Thus, slave owners used slave women as labor and as a means of continuing the institution of slavery by reproduction. Slave women were forced to reproduce in whatever way the owner deemed necessary. Owners encouraged the raping of slave women to enlarge the slave population. Owners and overseers who participated in this abuse had to justify it to a society which held itself out as maintaining “high moral standards.” They did so in the same manner in which they justified slave ownership. Black people, in general, had been cast as wild and animalistic, subhuman, and thus the enslavement of them was justified as being for the good of both blacks and whites.
Black women’s sexuality, similarly, was cast as wanton, perverse, and animalistic. As a group they were presumed to be unchaste and eagerly available. Thus, their sexual violation was not an offense. Black women who might have the temerity to complain were accused of being delusional or imagining that they had something to complain about. As the justification goes, the men were participating in activity which the women invited by their nature. Since they presumed that black women welcomed all sexual activity, their violations could not be viewed as rape. The justification often went further, painting black women as sexual aggressors. Thus, those who engaged in sexual activity with black women became the victims. This unenlightened image of black women’s sexuality continued after the end of slavery. And society continued to exploit the image for purposes of titillation as well as justification for abuse of black people in the same way that it exploited other myths of intellectual and moral inferiority it invented to excuse slavery.
Judge Thomas tapped into society’s shame about the myths of black sexuality when, in his “high-tech lynching” speech, he claimed that the sexual harassment charges pandered to sexual stereotypes of black men. His friend Harry Singleton asserted that he and Thomas had discussed