Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

8Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 55.

  9Wallace, M. (1976). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso, p. 109.

  10Wallace, M. (1976). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso, p. 110.

  11Wallace, M. (1976). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso, p. 11.

  12Wallace, M. (1976). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso, p. 24.

  13Wallace, M. (1976). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso, p. 27.

  14Wallace, M. (1976). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso, p. 119.

  15Wallace, M. (1976). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Verso, p. 120.

  16“A Black Feminist Commentary.” (1991, February 24). The San Francisco Chronicle.

  17Peters, E. (1978). “Some Tragic Propensities of Ourselves: The Occasion of Ntozake Shange’s ‘For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /When the Rainbow Is Enuf.’” Journal of Ethnic Studies 6 (1): 79–85.

  18Lester, N. A. (1992). “Shange’s Men: For Colored Girls Revisited, and Movement Beyond.” African American Review 26 (2): 319.

  19Lester, N. A. (1992). “Shange’s Men: For Colored Girls Revisited, and Movement Beyond.” African American Review 26 (2): 319.

  20Lester, N. A. (1992). “Shange’s Men: For Colored Girls Revisited, and Movement Beyond.” African American Review 26 (2): 319.

  21Flowers, S. H. (1981). “Colored Girls: Textbook for the Eighties.” Black American Literature Forum 15 (2): 51–54.

  22“A ‘Colored Girl’ Considers Success.” Essence (1982), p. 12.

  23Staples, R. (1979). “Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists .” The Black Scholar 10 (6/7): 24–33.

  24Malveaux, J. (1979). “The Sexual Politics of Black People: Angry Black Women, Angry Black Men.” The Black Scholar 10 (8/9): 32–35.

  25Hull, G. T. , Scott, P. B., & Smith, B. (1982). But Some of Us Are Brave. New York: Feminist Press, p. 18.

  26Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 10.

  27Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 148.

  28Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 152.

  29Bobo, J. (1988). “Black Women’s Responses to The Color Purple.” Jump Cut 33: 43–51.

  30 Banet-Weiser, S. (1999). The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

  31Reagan, R. (1976). “Campaign Speech.” Slate Voice. Retrieved on May 20, 2018 from https://​soundcloud.​com/​slate-articles/​ronald-reagan-campaign-speech.

  32Edsall, T. B. , & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 148.

  33Zucchino, D. (1997). Myth of the Welfare Queen: A Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist’s Portrait of Women on the Line. New York: Scribner, pp. 54–55.

  34“Black Leaders Praise Choice of First Black Miss America .” New York Times, September 19, 1983.

  35Goldsby, J. (1993). “Queen for 307 Days: Looking B(l)ack at Vanessa Williams and the Sex Wars.” In Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond th Lesbian Nation, ed. Arlene Stein. New York: Plume Books.

  36Gilliam, D. (1984, July 26). “A Sad Lesson.” The Washington Post.

  © The Author(s) 2019

  Duchess HarrisBlack Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trumphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95456-1_3

  3. Black Women’s Relationships with Party Politics

  Duchess Harris1

  (1)Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA

  Duchess Harris

  Email: harris@macalester.edu

  The Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Hearings

  During the month of October 1991, Anita Faye Hill , a law professor, gave sworn testimony before the Senate regarding her allegation of sexual harassment that she experienced while working for Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas at both the Department of Education and the Equal Opportunity Commission in the early 1980s.1 Hill’s statement recounted sexually explicit conversations and references allegedly made by Thomas to her on several occasions. Revisiting the 1991 Congressional saga of the confirmation process of Thomas to the Supreme Court reveals a context in which both race and gender identities were influential, particularly because the Hill-Thomas conflict was intra-racial rather than interracial. The shared racial identity of Thomas and Hill, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) members, created an environment in which gender became a more salient factor than race, providing a strong example of when and where gender can trump race for Black women in political positions and how gender remains even more divisive a political wedge than race.

  Yet race was not an unimportant element of the Hill-Thomas conflict. As Paula Giddings has observed, certain issues, especially those of a sexual nature, are considered taboo subjects for discussion within the African-American community.2 As a result, social pressures and fear of ostracism work against speaking out, as they might have in the Hill-Thomas case had Hill not been assertive and persistent in her insistence that Thomas’s behavior was egregious and needed to be exposed. According to Giddings , at the particular moments when racial rhetoric and gender rhetoric come into conflict, Black women are compelled to choose between the two. The Thomas-Hill case, by raising an issue that related specifically to women—sexual harassment—is a situation in which racial rhetoric was used both to support and to oppose Thomas within the African-American community.

  The public was largely supportive of the confirmation of Thomas—more than 38% of people polled after Hill’s allegations were made public advocated Thomas’s confirmation as a justice in the country’s highest court.3 What makes this statistic particularly compelling is a statistic which seems contradictory: More than 51% of respondents in the same survey expressed the opinion that they believed the Senate had not taken Hill’s claims as seriously as the allegation warranted.4 Yet the support of Thomas may be understood by the judge’s clever manipulation of the narrative he constructed about the conflict and his role in it. By claiming to be a victim of a “high-tech lynching,” Thomas was able to control the story being told in such a way as to prime the racial consciousness of most African-Americans, appealing to the highly charged metaphor of lynching. Through the use of racial characterizations regarding the charges against him as a group attack by someone with greater power rather than simply an attack against one man who happened to be African-American (and one who had behaved inappropriately and illegally), Thomas successfully swung public support away from Hill and toward himself.

  The public support of Thomas and the successful deployment of the lynching image may be further explained by Dawson’s Black Utility Heuristic ,5 which states that group interests will be used as a proxy for individual interests when making decisions. According to Mansbridge and Tate ,6 the racial imagery of lynching grouped with the “symbolic status [and authority] of [Thomas’s position and potential] office” activated the racial consciousness of most African-Americans. Because of Thomas’s appeal to the strong and unapologetically racial image of lynching, the general public may have thought that Thomas would make legal decisions on the Court that reflected his racial consciousness, despite evidence that Thomas exhibited positions on certain issues that differed from those of the African-American community in general. The real question regarding Thomas was, if he did feel some type of affinity toward any demographic group, which group would that be? It is entirely possible that Thomas may have been thinking of group benefits that were not based upon his racial group identity, but on his gender or class identity. This r
eliance upon descriptive representation , without regard for substantive representation , ultimately left the mass public disillusioned and without adequate representation, and left Hill without the ability to adopt either the conventional racial narrative or the conventional gendered narrative. Such were the complicated dynamics underlying the Thomas-Hill conflict.

  Thomas’s narrative effectively silenced and simultaneously discredited Hill. Thomas had usurped the narrative of racial solidarity, leaving Hill the solitary option of adopting a gendered narrative. However, gender-based rhetoric has long been associated with white feminists, and, in Hill’s case, the conventional gendered narrative would have been limiting, both ignoring her race and preventing her from garnering support from white feminists who have traditionally “owned” the gendered narrative. Hill’s intersectionality—the combination of her race and her gender—illuminated the ways in which the marginalization of Black women “within dominant discourse of resistance limits the means available to relate and conceptualize [the] experiences [of] Black women.”7 Despite the linked fate and shared consciousness among African-Americans, certain segments within the group hold positions of privilege with regard to political discourse, while other members—namely, women—are relegated to the margins. Specifically, “issues affecting men are often presented as representative of the condition of [the] entire community and thus worthy of a group response.”8 Racial solidarity has provided a united front for the advancement of African-Americans as a people, while at the same time silencing critiques within the group regarding the vast difference between substantive and descriptive representation and the failure to address issues of gender oppression that perpetuate self-destructive political outcomes such as the Thomas-Hill saga.9 Racial solidarity can provide a cohesive agenda for African-Americans as a group, but it should be possible to include within this discourse the voices of those marginalized within its boundaries, thus allowing Black women in power the opportunity to bring public attention to gendered issues.

  Although Hill was not competing for a political position, the dynamics of the Hill-Thomas case are illuminated by theoretical constructs about opportunities available to Black women in American politics. First, a Black woman’s success in politics appears to be closely tied to the support that Black men receive in the same state or locality; in this way, the electoral success of Black women is tied to that of Black men.10 When the intra-racial alliance is threatened, then, as it was in the Hill-Thomas debacle, the chances of the woman’s success are diminished. There are other theories that are important, too, and which also help to explain the kinds of dynamics underlying situations faced by Black women as described in previous chapters. In “Gender, Race, and the State Legislature : A Research Note on the Double Disadvantage Hypothesis,” Moncrief, Thompson, and Schuhmann11 discussed the issue of the “double disadvantage” hypothesis, which contends that Black women are politically disadvantaged both by gender and race. This hypothesis suggests that due to the double disadvantage, Black women experience difficulties competing in electoral politics in the USA. Supplementing the double disadvantage hypothesis is the “double whammy” theory, which posits that stigma are attached to both the gender and the racial identities of Black women in positions of leadership. It may be that in order for Black women to gain success in politics, they have to downplay gender issues to preserve racial solidarity. This compromise may also have implications for the types of positions that Black women are able to defend in the political arena when race is in conflict with any other variable.

  Still other theories, especially those drawn from the political science literature, have long acknowledged that Black women in general, and in the political arena in particular, are often forced to make a choice between being Black and being female, deciding where to align their loyalties when social conflicts arise that make both identities salient.12 The particular ways in which this choice played out for Anita Hill have been analyzed, yielding compelling results. While a graduate student at the University of Michigan, DeAunderia Bryant used the Lexis-Nexis Congressional Universe to analyze representatives’ floor statements, cross-referencing the 102nd Congress (1991–1992) with the name of each CBC member, as well as with the names of each white female representative. Bryant then combed through the dates to find any reference to Clarence Thomas during the month of October 1991; there was only one such statement for each representative who chose to speak.

  Next, Bryant cross-referenced Clarence Thomas with the same representatives’ names, examining statements reported by all major newspapers during October 1–31, 1991. The dates are significant because the first two weeks of October were when Thomas’s confirmation was in question, and the last two weeks of October followed Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, which occurred on October 15, 1991. Bryant categorized each newspaper article by content. Articles that mentioned race (including the apparent negation of race, as articulated in statements such as “This is not about race”), racism, segregation, Black Civil Rights, or the Civil Rights Movement were put in a “race” category. Articles categorized as having “gender” content included such references as sexual harassment, statements about Anita Hill specifically, and various statements about men not understanding or taking Hill’s allegations seriously. A third category Bryant devised was “ideology.” Examples from this category included references to the right wing, conservatives, the Bush administration, “vision and viewpoint,” and constitutional views. Bryant screened out statements—and there were many—regarding policy and partisanship, as well as those statements that made no specific references to race or gender.

  In October 29, 1991, women were serving in the House; of these 20 were Democrats and nine were Republicans; four of the Democrats were African-American. There were 21 African-American men; 20 were Democrats and one was Republican. In order to control for party differences, only Democrats were used in Bryant’s sample. Therefore, the study involved 20 female representatives (four of them Black) and 20 male CBC members. All data consisted of direct quotes only and numbers correspond to one set of categorization scores per newspaper or floor statement; therefore, a single statement could be assigned to more than one category (for instance, if the speaker addressed issues of both race and gender, then the statement would be classified in both categories). Bryant uses the terms “categorization” and “imagery” interchangeably because each statement brings to mind images of the race, gender, or ideology categories that are being referenced.

  The results of Bryant’s content analysis indicated that Black women used both race and gender to oppose Thomas, but their racial statements were an attempt to negate the role of race, such as, “This is about sex and not about race.” The statements of the female representatives differed dramatically from the types of racial statements made by male CBC members. For example, one male representative said, “We hope the administration gives the same type of attention and support to the Civil Rights Bill as they did the nomination of Clarence Thomas.” Note that this representative also deployed the strategy of speaking for the collective, using the word “We,” as if he represented all of his male colleagues. The male representatives’ acknowledgment of gender was minimal. Texas representative Craig Washington anticipated that the confirmation of Thomas would further restrict women who feel that they “can’t come forward because they’re fighting against the odds and they’re not going to win.” The only other gender reference made by a male was by New York representative Major Owens . Although Owens criticized Thomas for the judge’s apparent lapse of memory about his stance with respect to Roe v. Wade , Owens avoided mentioning sexual harassment, the subject at hand.

  The statements made by female CBC members were substantively different and tended to resemble the types of statements made by white female representatives. Most of the female representatives’ statements analyzed by Bryant articulated the women’s criticism of what they viewed as male colleagues’ failure to view the Thomas-Hill debacle as an obvious matter of se
xual harassment. Almost all of the women’s statements avoid the mention of race. The one exception was a statement made by Connecticut representative Barbara Kennedy , who negated race:Mr. Speaker, the compelling case for the nominee to the Supreme Court was not legal expertise, and it was not race. It was character, that out of the crucible of life experience, a man emerges with vision and a viewpoint that cannot be duplicated on the Supreme Court.

  Of 16 white female House members, 12 spoke out in floor statements, newspaper articles, or both. More statements were made by the senior women in the House, Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). At the time, Boxer was in the process of campaigning for a seat in the Senate. Both Schroeder and Boxer made one floor statement and received eight newspaper references. Schroeder was appalled by the entire confirmation process and stated:…it was like in The Wizard of Oz when the curtains were drawn back. Women saw…what a men’s club it has become…. The Senate is richer than the norm and may not understand women’s reactions to sexual harassment as much, because they’ve never needed a job. They say, ‘Why didn’t you just walk out?’ You can say that if you have a trust fund….’ Our whole culture is going through this traumatic, cataclysmic time when rules are changing. So I hope the men find out quick. There is going to be a real crash course in the Senate on sexual harassment.