Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [145]
I could not ignore these messages and the polls. I felt their sting. I read behind their open insult every plausible negative insinuation. Yet I longed for the community that was mine before partisanship and the politics of race and gender took it away from me. The author Zora Neale Hurston describes a scene in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in which a young black woman tried in a court of law is tried in the community court as well. In a poignant passage that reminded me all too much of my own situation, Hurston wrote in 1935:
The court set and Janie saw the judge who had put on a great robe to listen about her and Tea Cake. And twelve more white men had stopped whatever they were doing to listen and pass on what happened. That was funny too. Twelve strange men who didn’t know a thing about people like … her were going to sit on the thing.…
Then she saw all of the colored people standing up in the back of the courtroom.… They were all against her, she could see. So many were there against her that a light slap from each one of them would have beat her to death.
On October 10, 1991, as I prepared for my testimony, I spoke to my lawyers about my fear of this very rejection. “Whatever happens,” I told them, “I do not want to destroy my ties with the community.” I warned that the claim might be used to divide the community. Nevertheless, when I needed it most, it was not there. Nothing could have prepared me for the pain of what the rejection meant. Yet I could not bring myself to abandon it. In Hurston’s book, Janie is eventually reunited with her community. I could only hope for the same.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Despite the cynicism displayed during the hearing, eventually the disclosures led to an increase in formal complaints against harassers. Complaints filed with the EEOC increased by over 50 percent in the year following the hearing. In 1992 women and men filed a record-breaking number of complaints with the federal agency, some 7,407 total. Women proved the pundits wrong and understood the difference between how women felt and acted and how they are perceived. An explosion of challenges in the workplace led employers to take action. Whether they were motivated by desire to end the behavior or the fear of liability is not certain. What is certain is that workingwomen welcomed the chance to change intolerable circumstances in the workplace and to confront employers who were previously insensitive to the problem. Rather than recoil, women and many men galvanized around the issue.
This galvanization on the issue of sexual harassment led to the collective disgust the country felt when we learned of the so-called Tailhook incident. The initial incident centered around the sexual assault and molestation of over two dozen women at the Las Vegas Hilton during an annual meeting of an association of navy pilots. The subsequent cover-up told as much about the seriousness with which some viewed sexual misconduct as the incident itself.
Despite the navy’s zero-tolerance antiharassment policy, and despite the numerous payments of lip service to sensitivity to the behavior following the Thomas hearing, Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, one of the first women to complain, met entrenched resistance to her charges. Instead of investigating the complaint to determine what had happened and who had participated, top officials participated in a blatant cover-up of the matter. As it turned out, this was not the first year that behavior of this nature occurred at the annual convention of the Tailhook Association. It was simply the first time that women banded together and complained. Just prior to the incident the rhetoric led to hope that if everyone understood what sexual harassment was, it could be stopped. If the military responded this way in the face of what constituted criminal molestation, what hope was there for swift effective reaction to harassment in the private workplace? The message from the navy was a discouraging one, another hurdle to overcome.
Even before I met Paula Coughlin in 1992 at the Glamour Magazine