Believable Hill ruins good man's solid rep
/The Boston Herald
This is what I wrote on October 13, 1991. It is August 27, 2019 that I have cut and pasted this column here. And my truth today? I don’t know who to believe.
All the time Anita Hill was speaking, all the hours she sat calmly, politely answering what I considered to be vicious, personal attacks on her word, I believed her. I believed her because she was unflappable. I believed her because she was well-educated and well-spoken. I believed her becausethere was no apparent reason for her to lie. What did she have to gain? Why would she expose herself to humiliation and inquisition, if she were not telling the truth?
Mostly I believed her because I put myself in her place.
When she talked about Clarence Thomas, I thought about a man who years ago had harassed me, though that's not the word I used or even thought back then. I hate to be around him, I told a friend. He makes me uncomfortable. I don't know what to do when he says the things he does.
I pictured his nomination for an important federal job.
I pictured the FBI knocking on my door asking questions. And I pictured myself not wanting to tell, not wanting to ruin his life, but doing exactly what Anita Hill did, because it was my civic duty, my moral obligation. I understood why she didn't start off with elaborate detail. I wouldn't have either. I understood why she didn't report him long ago.
Neither did I.
And so by virtue of my own limited experiences, I judged Clarence Thomas. He was a man. He had been accused by a reluctant accuser. I therefore assumed he was guilty.
But then I listened to him speak. And watched him, Friday night and all day Saturday. And heard him struggle with anger and hurt and disbelief and disillusionment as his reputation, as his entire life, was trampled and defiled in front of the whole world, as he stated again and again that he never said or did any of the things Anita Hill has accused him of doing, as he tried to defend his integrity.
And this time instead of thinking about me, my experience and my agenda as a female; instead of thinking about how divisive this whole thing is for the country; instead of thinking about gender or politics, I thought only about this one man and his pain, how impossible it is for him to prove his innocence, and how tragic it is that he should be so publicly shamed.
Anita Hill's quiet courage and dignity, what she was doing for women, had mesmerized me. As a woman I felt allegiance to her.
But when her voice was stilled, and Thomas spoke, when he talked from his heart about what her allegations had done to his life, accomplished what the Ku Klux Klan and all the racists put together had tried but failed to do - destroyed his reputation, undermined his faith, devastated his family - the whole tawdry mess changed from cause to calamity.
Obscenities had been spray-painted on Clarence Thomas' house, on his family's home, and he was being forced not just to stand in front of it and talk over it and deny doing it, but to explain how it came to be.
"Why" is the million-dollar question in all of this. If Thomas could answer that he'd be home free. Why would a woman with seemingly nothing to gain cause such hurt and subject herself to inconvenience, criticism and hate along the way?
Maybe she believes that what she says happened, did happen. Or maybe she has something to gain. Who knows. Only time will tell.
The injustice in all this is not only that Thomas' reputation has been unnecessarily and mercilessly destroyed, not only that 43 years of a life well-lived have been wiped out in a single weekend.
The biggest injustice is that so many people in this country are focusing on an accusation, on the words of a solitary woman, instead of on the silent testimony of the hundreds of women Thomas has worked with over the years who know these allegations to be untrue, instead of on the proven good that Clarence Thomas has done. Clarence Thomas' life is testimony to his words.
