To Whom Apologies Are Really Due

[firedupdem]

I had a visceral reaction to the news that Virginia Thomas had called Anita Hill and asked her for an apology. In 1991 I was a college freshman, and the televised Hill-Thomas hearings were my adult initiation into the public vilification of black women. I watched as white male senators and conservative commentators exploited the common myth of black women as promiscuous to cast Hill as oversexed and delusional. I remember when Thomas draped himself in the history of America's racial violence by angrily referring to his confirmation process as a "high-tech lynching." Although there is no history of white men forming a posse to punish those who sexually assault black women, Thomas deployed the lynching trope to great effect. After the comment, his approval ratings rose sharply among black Americans, many of whom maligned Hill as a race traitor who allowed her story to be used by powerful white opponents to harm the credibility of an African-American man. The Hill-Thomas hearings were an object lesson in the joint complicity of black communities and white power structures in the public humiliation of black women to meet conservative ends: being both black and a woman means you can be maligned by both racist and sexist discourse.

So my stomach flipped when I learned of Virginia Thomas's phone call. Her request is the aggressive act of a right-wing activist unwilling to allow her opponent the dignity of privacy. And it is much more. Ginni Thomas's insistence that Hill apologize is an apt metaphor for the long history of blaming black women for social ills. After the Civil War black women were considered a potential public menace. Social reformers claimed that black women's sexual immorality was the cause of urban disruptions during the 1920s Great Migration. In the 1960s liberal policy-makers worried that black women were matriarchs who undermined family stability. And in the 1980s Ronald Reagan painted black women as welfare queens robbing the public coffers. In our current economic downturn, the explicit and implicit public denigration of African-American women is in vogue across the political spectrum and is supported from within black communities as much as it is imposed from the outside. Once again, black women find themselves blamed as one of the central causes of, rather than one of the primary victims of, American social and economic decline, and many are calling on black women to apologize for their own suffering.

http://www.thenation.com/article/155630/whom-apologies-are-really-due

[bliss_eternal]

1. how disturbing...

...that someone who was not privy to clarence thomas's harassment, thinks they are owed anything, by Anita Hill. i disliked much of what i heard in the public arena, and w/in aa circles in regard to anita hill and that debacle. i'm putting it mildly when i say it was "difficult at best" to find anyone of color who thought anita hill, wasn't making some bizarre bid "for attention." as if women who are harassed, assaulted, etc.--ask for it, secretly desire it, humiliate themselves for revenge, etc.

it was the first time i saw how misogynistic the aa community is, and can be. i didn't have that name for it, at the time. i just remember feeling confused, angry, outraged and protective of ms. hill.

[cyndensco]

3. I cannot remember anyone in my circle who discounted Anita Hill's claims.

I think many of us were so AGAINST thomas - his views on Affirmative Action and his other conservative opinions, his nomination by bush, his assuming the seat of Thurgood Marshall as the black on the bench, etc. etc. - that we APPLAUDED Anita Hill's entry into the hearings. We laughed at thomas' perversions and truly hoped Anita would derail his confirmation. We believed her. His "high-tech lynching" claim seemed at the very least, opportunistic. I saw him as one who would declare "brotha-hood" only when it would benefit him.



edited for typo :(

[bliss_eternal]

6. that's wonderful to hear...!

seriously! :thumbsup: i envy that.

my personal friends (older women of various ethnic backgrounds) all backed Anita Hill. sadly i lived and worked in an area at the time, that seemed to be over populated by people who hated clarence thomas, but still chose to doubt hill's assertions. :mad:
very frustrating.

i learned to only discuss the issue w/my friends. all the others, just got the major side-eye. :eyes:

[Number23]

2. Girl. Reading this -- with every word my shoulders dropped

My neck started hurting and now my lower back is talking to me.

This is a hell of a read, firedup and I'm glad that you posted it. But it's just so damn DEMORALIZING.

"Even President Obama has argued that America's imperial hegemony is threatened by inadequate educational achievement. Beneath that anxiety is the implication that this shortcoming can be traced to failing black mothers and to their public employee counterparts—urban public school teachers, who are disproportionately women. Never mind the high cost of quality daycare, the lack of affordable housing, the challenge of balancing work and parenting, the poor prenatal care and childhood health and dental coverage—black women should be able to raise honor students through sheer force of will!"

We've talked about this before in AAIG and yes, it's great for black leaders to give inspirational speeches encouraging black folks to do better. I am 100% for that. But I'm also for these same black leaders to recognize the massive uphill battle that so many of us have to contend with every SINGLE day of our lives. This article is a great reminder of some of those challenges. And that's why I'm having an actual physical reaction to reading it.

And on a personal note, as someone who grew up in a single parent, inner city environment, it gets SO tiring to be constantly told that I should be smoking crack or birthing my 8th baby with my 5th baby daddy. I'm sure that the folks who came up with the No Wedding, No Womb initiative had good things in mind, but the idea that marriage is the cure for whatever ails all women is insulting, outdated and ridiculous.

[firedupdem]

4. I hear you 23

But I'm also for these same black leaders to recognize the massive uphill battle that so many of us have to contend with every SINGLE day of our lives. This article is a great reminder of some of those challenges.

I thought she did a very good job in this article of pointing this out.

On your personal note...I completely understand. Two of my closest, and might I add most successful friends, came from single parent households in not so nice neighborhoods. That broad brush painting of single parent households really needs to stop. Children shouldn't be automatically placed "at risk" simply because they were born to a single parent.

[Number23]

5. Thank you, darling

I really appreciate that. :hug: Wish everyone felt that way.

Do I wish that I'd grown up in a lovely two-parent household with a loving father?? I do more than anyone could ever know. But that's not what I had.

What I did have was a strong, hard-working mother who raised me by herself while she worked and went to law school. From my mother, I learned strength, courage, resilience and the value of education -- lessons that were strongly reinforced by the other members of my family. And I thank God darn near every day that I grew up in Atlanta, where blackness was something that was seen as a tremendous strength, almost a gift. Sometimes I wonder if growing up in Atlanta/the South made me TOO focused on being black, but when I got out into the real world, I realized that I have never seen the color of my skin as a weakness or as something to be downplayed, minimized or to be ashamed of. So I come away thankful that I grew up where I did.

I'm sure that there are a million other black people from single parent households who feel as I do. The idea that the troubles in our community can all be laid at the feet of unmarried black women is something I cannot tolerate.

[Number23]

7. Firedup, thought you might like to see this

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=9501007&mesg_id=9503229

Complements this OP nicely.