Invisible Woman: Reflections on the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings
Files
Description
As I sat behind Anita Hill during the second round of hearings for the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, I felt as if I had stepped into a carnival fun house, where the world simultaneously becomes larger than life and fundamentally warped. Here were members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, despite promises to engage in a genuine fact-finding hearing into the allegations of sexual harassment raised by Hill, distorting the hearing process with the verbal equivalent of mirrors and lights. Even on the occasion of recommending a nominee for a lifetime appointment to this nation's highest court, U.S. senators appeared incapable of rising above their large egos and petty politics to take their investigatory task seriously. Because they could appreciate the complexity of neither the issue of sexual harassment nor the person who sat before them, they failed to establish a process that might have begun to unearth the truth about what had transpired between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Instead, they allowed the hearing to degenerate into a circus sideshow.
Source Publication
Critical Race Feminism: A Reader
Source Editors/Authors
Adrien Katherine Wing
Publication Date
1997
Edition
1
Recommended Citation
Taylor-Thompson, Kim A., "Invisible Woman: Reflections on the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings" (1997). Faculty Chapters. 2070.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/2070
