After the Anita Hill hearings, dialogue around black sexual harassment was dominated by wealthy, mostly white voices
Black feminists had to literally buy their way into the conversation
On the afternoon of October 11, 1991, professor Anita Hill leaned into her microphone at the front of a crowded Senate hearing room. In measured but grave tones, she told the all-white, all-male Judiciary Committee how her “very good working relationship” with Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had transformed into a nightmare. “What happened next,” Hill said, “and telling the world about it are the two most difficult experiences of my life.” She reported that Thomas had pressured her to go on dates, and when she refused, he used every conceivable opportunity to bombard her with graphic descriptions of sex and brag of his sexual prowess. “I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, particularly in such a graphic way,” Hill testified. “I told him I did not want to talk about these subjects.” Thomas had refused to take no for an answer, and this had taken an enormous emotional toll on Hill’s work. She argued that those who made workplaces hostile for women were unfit for the Supreme Court.
Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings and Anita Hill’s revelations brought the U.S. into an entirely new arena of public discourse on the intersection of race, gender, and class. “Never before had the issue of sexuality between black men and black women played out before a national audience,” wrote professors Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, who are experts in community problem solving, also known as “action research.” Depending on who you asked, either Anita Hill was a brave feminist standing up to an oppressor or she was breaking an unspoken code that African Americans would not “take each other down.” Some considered her a liar, others that she was making a big deal out of nothing. Polemics ran in newspapers of record. Pundits pontificated on television and the radio, but curiously absent — or deliberately excluded — were the very people who had the keenest insight on the issue: black women.
In October, a black Harvard professor, Orlando Patterson, wrote an article essentially arguing that the Hill-Thomas affair was a collision of black social dynamics and white workplace culture. But his argument largely ignored the experiences unique to black womanhood. Meanwhile, as the debate unfolded, a group of black feminists were outraged to discover how few black women’s voices had been included in the public dialogue. The conversation was dominated by wealthy, mostly white voices, and it wasn’t speaking to their experience of being both black and female. Feminism, at least the variety that appeared on television and in the papers, had failed to account for their reality. Racialized sexism appeared to have no place in the conversation.
On November 17, 1991, a group of black feminist activists came up with an unusual plan to make sure their voices were heard. They would buy their way into the conversation.
African American Women in Defense of Ourselves (AAWIDO) began as a trio of black feminist intellectuals: the Dartmouth sociologist Deborah King and University of Maryland and University of Illinois historians Elsa Barkley Brown and Barbara Ransby. They were inspired by black feminist activists like the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist lesbian organization that had argued during the late seventies and early eighties that white feminism had failed to address the concerns of black women. “There was an urgent need for Black women to make sense of the Hill–Thomas event, and come to terms about what could be learned from such a painful situation,” Ransby wrote. “There was no place for our anger or our insights.”
Brown, King, and Ransby made a public call for black female academics, lawyers, secretaries, teachers, and others to share their perspective on the Thomas–Hill events. With this record of the black female experience in hand, they crafted a manifesto that addressed Clarence Thomas’s nomination both in terms of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment and his conservative political ideology, which they saw as a danger to all women, the working class, and the elderly. They took the media and the government to task, lambasting their treatment of Hill and President George H.W. Bush’s failure to address the needs of black people in America. In total, 1,603 women signed the statement. After fundraising for six weeks, they had enough money — $10,000 — to run a full-page ad in The New York Times. At just over 500 words, it was seen alongside ads for Bergdorf Goodman, Tiffany & Co., and Lancome on November 17, 1991, and simultaneously in 11 black newspapers nationwide.
To Thomas’s claim that the attack on him was “a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks,” the AAWIDO countered that his words were “a perversion of the struggle against racism and white supremacy.” “Many have erroneously portrayed the allegations against Clarence Thomas as an issue of either gender or race,” it read.
“As women of African descent, we understand sexual harassment as both … As Anita Hill’s experience demonstrates, Black women who speak of these matters are not likely to be believed … In 1991, we cannot tolerate this type of dismissal of any one Black woman’s experience or this attack upon our collective character without protest, outrage and resistance … We pledge ourselves to continue to speak out in defense of one another, in defense of the African American community and against those who are hostile to social justice, no matter what color they are.”
The documented concluded: “No one will speak for us but ourselves.”
As economist Julianne Malveaux later wrote, AAWIDO’s manifesto “reminded Black women that no one should speak for us, except us. No one can be relied on to defend us, except us. And no one can be depended on to celebrate us, but us. No one can lead advocacy for our equal pay, but us.” But the manifesto also told another, more discouraging story: black women had to purchase their place in a conversation that white women and men were granted for free.
In 2011, on the 20-year anniversary of Hill’s testimony, UCLA professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw reflected in The Nation on the legacy of AAWIDO. The title of the piece — “Black Women Still in Defense of Ourselves” — serves as both a rallying cry and a reminder that black women still largely stand alone in their fight for visibility and are the only viable arbiters of their experiences. “Black women still find themselves defending their name,” Crenshaw writes, “often alone, sometime against friends and usually against predictable foes.”
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