Anita Hill Roundtable

In 1991 the televised coverage of African American lawyer Anita Hill testifying that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her riveted the nation and mobilized activism around sexual harassment. A new documentary, Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, sheds light on the important legacy of the Anita Hill hearings. Produced and directed by Academy Award−winning filmmaker Frieda Lee Mock and released in March 2014, the film also brings these events to the attention of a new and younger audience—a generation of young men and women who may not yet have been born in 1991 or are too young to remember them.

This younger audience might need to stretch their imaginations to hearken back to a time when “sexual harassment” was a relatively arcane legal term. In 1986, only five years prior to Anita Hill’s testimony, a Supreme Court ruling first established “sexual harassment” as a form of sexual discrimination under Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act. After Anita Hill’s case “sexual harassment” became a household term. The lengthy and detailed televised interrogation of Anita Hill by an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee and their un-abashed incredulity regarding her testimony galvanized a groundswell of feminist activism. Women spoke out in unprecedented numbers against workplace sexual harassment. The hearings also mobilized women to run for public office in what became known as the “Year of the Woman.” The 1992 elections in the United States raised the number of women in the House of Representatives from twenty-eight to forty-seven and put six women in the Senate.

In addition the hearings inspired thousands of young people to redouble their commitments to a type of feminism that analyzed gender, race, sexuality, and class as intersecting categories. In a powerful essay immediately following Anita Hill’s testimony, Rebecca Walker, daughter of African American author Alice Walker and a college student at the time, coined the term Third Wave feminism. “Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger,” she wrote, “Turn that outrage into political power. I am a postfeminist feminist. I am the Third Wave.”¹

Recently, four history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies graduate students from Ohio State University convened to watch and discuss the film.² The roundtable that follows includes their reflections on the film. Their comments about Anita: Speaking Truth to Power remind us of the continuing relevance of Anita Hill’s testimony. Today sexual violence continues to pervade college campuses, the military, workplaces, and homes across the United States and internationally. The film casts a spotlight on these ongoing issues. It stimulates intergenerational conversations that suggest a fresh surge of activism and pushes us to think about the changes that still lie ahead.

Context

sierra:

Although I was only three years old at the time of the hearing, every image I have ever seen of Anita Hill has evoked feelings of beauty, power, and resiliency—attributes that characterize a rich sociohistorical legacy of resistance among women of the African Diaspora. I remember feeling a connection to her because of the way she wore her hair in a roller-set style, or the way the dark undertones of her red lipstick complemented her smooth brown skin. This is such a vivid memory because she reminded me of my mother and many of the other women in my life at that time. It caused me to feel a deeper connection to her.

peggy:

In 1991, when Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was only five years old, barely aware that sexual harassment existed. If someone had asked me about the issue then, I might have been able to speak about it with as much eloquence as the all-white and all-male committee. I first encountered Anita Hill in an introduction to women’s studies course I took as a junior in college, sixteen years after the hearings took place. As part of a section on Third Wave feminism we read Walker’s “Becoming the Third Wave...