Applications Of Feminist Legal Theory

Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill

• ~S) Whose Story Is It, Anyway?Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill KIMBERLE CRENSHAW As TELEVISION, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings played beautifully as an episode right out of 'The Twilight Zone." Stunned by the drama's mystifying images, its misplaced pairings, and its baffling contradictions, viewers found themselves in a parallel universe where political allegiances barely imaginable a moment earlier sprang to life: an administration that won an election through the shameless exploitation of the mythic black rapist took the offensive against stereotypes about black male sexuality ; a political party that had been the refuge of white resentment won the support, however momentary, of the majority ofMrican Americans; a black neoconservative individualist whose upward mobility was fueled by his unbounded willingness to stymie the advancement of other Mrican Americans was embraced under the wings of racial solidarity; and a black woman, herself a victim of racism, was symbolically transformed into the role of a would-be white woman whose unwarranted finger-pointing whetted the appetites of a racist lynch mob. But it was no 'Twilight Zone" that America discovered when Anita Hill came forward . America simply stumbled into the place where Mrican-American women live, a political vacuum of erasure and contradiction maintained by the almost routine polarization of "blacks and women" into separate and competing political camps. Existing within the overlapping margins of race and gender discourse and in the empty spaces between, it is a location whose very nature resists telling. This location contributes to black women's ideological disempowerment in a way that tipped the scales against Anita Hill from the very start. While there are surely many dimensions of the Thomas-Hill episode that contributed to the way it played out, my focus on the ideological plane is based on the idea that at least one important way social power is mediated in American society is through the contestation between the many narrative structures through which reality might be perceived and talked about. By this I mean to focus on the intense interpretive conflicts that ultimately bear on the particular ways that realities are socially constructed. Ideology, seen in the form of the narrative tropes From Raee-ingJustice, En-gendering Power by Toni Morrison, editor. Copyright © 1992 by Kimberle Crenshaw . Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. 826 Copyrighted Material Whose Story Is It, Anyway? I 827 available for representing our experience, was a factor of social power to the extent that Anita Hill's inability to be heard outside the rhetorical structures within which cultural power has been organized hampered her ability to achieve recognition and support . Thus, Anita Hill's status as a black female-at the crossroads of gender and race hierarchies-was a central feature in the manner in which she was (mis)perceived.... The particular experience of black women in the dominant cultural ideology of American society can be conceptualized as intersectional. Intersectionality captures the way in which the particular location of black women in dominant American social relations is unique and in some senses unassimilable into the discursive paradigms of gender and race domination. One commonly noted aspect of this location is that black women are in a sense doubly burdened, subject in some ways to the dominating practices of both a sexual hierarchy and a racial one. In addition to this added dimension, intersectionality also refers to the ways that black women's marginalization within dominant discourses ofresistance limits the means available to relate and conceptualize our experiences as black women. In legal doctrine this idea has been explored in terms of doctrinal exclusion, that is, the ways in which the specific forms of domination to which black females are subject sometimes fall between the existing legal categories for recognizing injury.l Underlying the legal parameters of racial discrimination are numerous narratives reflecting discrimination as it is experienced by black men, while the underlying imagery of gender discrimination incorporates the experiences of white women. The particularities ofblack female subordination are suppressed as the terms of racial and gender discrimination law require that we mold our experience into that of either white women or black men in order to be legally recognized. . . . When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose. The Thomas/Hill controversy presents a stark illustration of the problem as evidenced by the opposition between narratives...