The charges against him, Thomas saw quickly, were legal junk. One aspect of that junk was dangerous legal junk -- a set of charges that he had boasted of his "sexual prowess," of the "larger than normal" size of his own penis, accompanied by a drumbeat of other references to the mythic dimensions of black men’s genitals.
"Legal junk," of course, means evidentiary junk, and that means something in addition to the fact that the charges were unprovable and there were no witnesses to attest to them. It means that, save for the dangerous allegations, the speech crimes as presented at the hearings had little or no significance to begin with. Anita Hill simply made a group of empty generalizations or recited a list of subjects that one can find in library card catalogs, in dictionaries, in encyclopedias, in articles, in monographs, and in books. How, in what words, in what style, Thomas had discussed those subjects, at all, were the crucial missing factors. Most of Hill’s charges were an invitation to mass projection.
There was also corroborative junk. Three witnesses -- all lawyers -- testified that Hill had told them 10 years ago that she was depressed and was blaming her depression on unspecified verbal behavior, by implication of a sexual nature, by her boss. Hill did not even offer her subject list or her generalizations to those lawyers. She gave them no information at all. The lawyers were preternaturally incurious, asked no questions, requested no evidence, and, according to their testimony, all said the equivalent of, "Poor dear." A fourth lawyer testified that some years later Hill had told him that she left the EEOC because she had been "sexually harassed" by her boss. But still this famous list of speech crimes did not surface.
All that was established by her friends’ testimony was that 10 years ago Anita Hill had been depressed and had attributed her depression to Thomas. This total absence of legal evidence was no doubt the reason that Hill’s lawyers gave her a polygraph test, which is further evidentiary junk not accepted by our courts. It was an act of legal desperation to help a client who had been blowing evidentiary smoke.
Finally, there may have been outright psychological junk. Hill’s strangely passive legal witnesses were aware of her depression but did not check her competence. One witness tried to establish Hill’s competence by saying, "I have never known Anita to express anger," a bizarre comment, since repressed anger is a common characteristic of depression. Another witness sought to strengthen the claim that Hill is stable by testifying that to Hill fictional characters are not "real." Apart from the implication that people who read novels suffer from instability, the fact is that fictional characters are more intensely real than everyday people -- that is the purpose of art. Hill’s inability to accept fictional beings as "real" and her inability to express anger may have reflected an emotional disorder -- one that could prevent her from correctly interpreting the style, mood, and intent of any discourse dependent on affect. To say any consideration of Hill’s psychological or emotional states is "blaming the victim" is to beg the question.
In summary, evidentiary junk, corroborative junk, and possibly psychological junk, had all been dragged out at the last minute to destroy a Supreme Court nominee.
DANGER
But all this junk Thomas denied, then swept aside. What he took seriously was the dangerous junk interwoven throughout. He immediately saw that he had been hit
by the oldest and most murderous racist stereotype directed at the black male: the black male as sexual beast; the subhuman, predatory ape without sensibilities and without morals; the stereotype amply documented by Franklin Frazier in the l950s (his 10th edition still being read in 1968) and exemplified by the crackling radio jokes about "gorillas in the mist" from the white Los Angeles cops in 1991. That stereotype was hundreds of years old, it was still alive, and Thomas accurately understood that it had been aimed at him.
He also knew its origins, its vicious hypocrisy, and its social uses. For all the constitutional talk forbidding blacks human status, our Founding Fathers -- like the French, Spanish, and Portuguese aristocrats who imported black slaves into the New World -- were fully aware that blacks were human beings. Such men happily slept with black women, fell in love with them, protected the children they fathered by them, freed those children, adopted them. They safeguarded their own black sons, often by sending them abroad for higher education. But they reserved a different and frightful fate for the unprotected black boy -- not for the girl, only for the boy. As soon as he reached puberty, as soon as he was sexually mature, he turned, magically and abruptly, into the Mythic Black Beast who became sexually taboo for white women. Thus did the white men control their paternity and property lines. Any alleged breach of the sexual taboo could, and often did, mean death -- for the black male.
That is what the dangerous legal junk meant to Thomas. He knew that, regardless of the lack of legal evidence, the humanity of his female accuser would be assumed, as indeed it was. He knew he would have to establish his own humanity, and to do so at a mock trial.
The Thomas who reentered the hearing room was the "real" Clarence Thomas, the man without Republican handlers, with only two people at his side: his old and trusted friend Danforth, who was shaking with volcanic rage, and Virginia Lamp Thomas, his white wife, who sat motionless, tears rolling down her cheeks. From the depths of his Richard Wright-infused subconscious, Thomas made statements and leveled his own charges, charges that totally disoriented the Senate Judiciary Committee. The senators, like children who had played too long with matches, suddenly grasped that they had set the whole house afire and had no idea what to do about it.
Thomas said, "I died. The person you knew -- whether you voted for me or against me -- died." He said, "I’ve been harmed, my family has been harmed. I’ve been harmed worse than I’ve ever been harmed in my life. I wasn’t harmed by the Klan. I wasn’t harmed by the Knights of Camelia. I wasn’t harmed by the Aryan Race. I wasn’t harmed by any racist group. I was harmed by this process -- this process, which accommodated these attacks on me….I would have preferred an assassin’s bullet." He described what had occurred as a "high-tech lynching" and informed the Judiciary Committee grimly: "I will not provide the rope for my own lynching."
Even when he talked quietly and calmly, he was clearly in a state of uncontrollable mutiny. When asked whether he wanted to withdraw his name from nomination, he replied, "I’d rather die than withdraw. If they’re gonna kill me, they’re gonna kill me….I’d rather die than withdraw from the process -- not for the purpose of serving on the Supreme Court but for the purpose of not withdrawing from this process." Somewhere inside Clarence Thomas was the unmistakable voice of Bigger Thomas, refusing in extremis to submit to the white man’s power: "You can’t make me do nothing but die!" And whatever these white senators understood, they knew that to be true. Their power had become entirely destructive; they could make him do nothing but die.
It was mainly from Sen. Orrin Hatch, who by means sensible and not had consistently conveyed his sympathy for Thomas, that Thomas consented to hear Anita Hill’s charges. He had refused to attend or to listen to the session at which she herself had testified. In this exchange, Hatch became the only man on the committee to admit, honestly, that he did not understand the phenomenon of the stereotyped racist attack:
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