Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [31]
According to Thomas, no one was to be trusted. Because I was one of two personal assistants, I had only one colleague, and he encouraged me not to trust even her. As the personal assistant to an appointee, I was expected to protect him from his higher-ups as well as from career government workers. And I was expected to keep Thomas’ secrets, personal and work-related, no matter how disturbing. I might have disagreed with Thomas in private (as I often did), but in public I needed to put on a good face for other appointees, those who were working in the agency when I arrived and those who would remain there when I left. Whether an assistant in government “worked out,” was retained or promoted and enjoyed the continued patronage of the supervisor, or gets “blackballed” depended more on personality than quality of work. It was the nature of the workplace. Had I failed to fulfill the unwritten duties, I would have been fired or shunted away to do irrelevant work. There was little choice in the matter. In staying, I balanced my concern for the issues and my ability to voice objections directly to Thomas against a flawed work environment that I was powerless to change.
In August 1981, shortly after his appointment, I went to work with Clarence Thomas. When I arrived, I did not know of the unwritten duties. But as his special assistant, I quickly learned. My youth and inexperience showed, but I caught on fast. I had just turned twenty-five and was only one year out of law school, with no government experience, but Wald had prepared me for the long hours it would take to gain the knowledge I needed. Uncertainty and apprehension appropriately describe my first few weeks, but I was excited too. And for the first time my work offered the potential for making a positive professional contribution in an area I cared about personally.
I had the support of my friends from law school who lived in Washington. Kim Taylor, who had recently left her job at a firm for a position in the local public defender’s office, was as enthusiastic about my leaving the private sector as she had been about her own move. Even those politically opposed to the stated policies of the administration were sympathetic to my wanting to get out of the law firm environment for more personally satisfying work. One classmate, Roger Clegg, was working for the administration. Our mutual friend Mike Debow, who was even more disenchanted with private practice than I, would later take a government appointment. Both were enthusiastic about my move—for political reasons as well as for reasons having to do with the substance of the work. My parents, however, objected—not so much on political grounds as because of their work ethic. My parents had been very proud of the fact that I had secured a job with a law firm right out of law school. They could not understand why I would leave a good, well-paying job so soon after starting it. And they were concerned about the risk involved in changing positions.
I spent much of my time at the Office for Civil Rights looking at current research on the educational development of minority children. The office was the chief enforcement agency for combating race and gender discrimination in education under Titles VI and IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The caseload of the Office for Civil Rights consisted of claims of race and gender discrimination in the provision of education and educational facilities. I was assigned mostly special projects and did very little casework.
One of my projects was to review and monitor the progress of the Adams litigation, a case that had begun as a lawsuit against the secretary of education, Joseph Califano, in 1972. The suit involved questions of the continued viability of the historically black colleges in several states, most of them in the South. The discriminatory manner in which states had