Black Women Seen as Reluctant to Claim Harassment : Rights: They are under pressure to preserve race solidarity. However, their reaction in Thomas-Hill case indicates that the issue has struck home.

Oklahoma law professor Anita Faye Hill’s public allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas may be having a profound effect on one group that historically has shied away from confronting the emotion-charged issue--the nation’s black women.

Fearful of disrupting the appearance of racial solidarity, black women for the most part have left it to their white counterparts to combat sexual harassment and other gender-related issues.

Their reluctance to speak out, many professional black women say, stems from intense community pressure to reduce black-on-black conflicts and to avoid feeding painful historical stereotypes about black sexuality.

But there are indications that Hill’s example may begin to change all that. “It seems that professional black women have reacted as strongly as, if not stronger, than white women on this issue,” said Pat King, a Georgetown University law professor, who is black.

“That is a watershed moment because black women have not spoken out on sexual issues as strongly as white women,” King said. “Perhaps what we’re seeing now is a rising comfort level (among black women) to speak out about the things that hurt us as women.”

Black women have faced a kind of double jeopardy in dealing with the sexual harassment issue, according to Julia R. Scott, director of the Washington office of the National Black Women’s Health Project.

“We’ve got two taboos here that place black women in double jeopardy,” Scott said: “We’re talking about sex and we’re talking about race.”

Scott and many other black women professionals say that they suffer when they see issues that concern them dismissed as unimportant. But they must deal with the myth, they say, that they are oversexed and ever-receptive to men’s advances.

Rather than grappling with those issues, black women have concentrated on challenging racial discrimination, often at the price of not actively confronting unwanted and inappropriate sexual overtures from black men.

“Within our own community, we don’t speak out,” Scott said, “because we don’t want to air our dirty linen in front of white people. And, if we do, we get tagged with being a disreputable person because we spoke out against our men.”

But the sudden and emotional outpouring of support from black women for Hill after her allegation of sex harassment on a nationally televised news conference Monday suggests that the issue hit home with black women.

And even some black men say that they have become involved in new debates since Hill’s allegations were made public, attempting to untangle the escalating anger and frustration among the women in their offices and homes.

“She has put this issue on the national agenda,” said Susan McHenry, executive editor of Emerge magazine, a Manhattan publication aimed at upscale black readers.

“I am convinced that within our community there will start to be a dialogue about sexual harassment,” McHenry said. “She is the beginning of an educative process that will have to go on in the African-American community, just as it’s going on in larger society.”

Ironically, the key case in the area of sexual harassment involved a black woman, Mechelle Vinson, and her black male boss, Sidney Taylor.

In that case, in 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court said in a landmark ruling that sexual harassment is not limited to situations in which a boss requires sexual favors from a subordinate. The case enshrined the concept of “hostile environment” as a form of sex discrimination.

Yet Charles Lawrence, a Stanford University law professor, said that many black men fail to understand why Hill would continue working with Thomas after he had made sexual overtures.

Black men’s confusion, Lawrence said, exposes “a real gender difference” in the perception of sexual harassment between men and women. “It reflects our own failure as black men to see the analogy to a racial implication on our jobs,” he said.

“All black males who work in predominantly white institutions have had to remain silent in the face of inappropriate, injurious, insulting racial comments,” Lawrence explained. “And they stay on the job--some even go running after tennis appointments and other social engagements with the very same racists--in an effort to advance their careers. It’s a perfectly analogous situation to Prof. Hill’s.”

Among the first to rally behind Hill was a group of 10 prominent black women lawyers and lobbyists, led by Mary Francis Berry, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Elaine Jones of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Washington office.

Joined by several prominent leaders of white-directed feminist organizations, they rushed Monday morning to meet with Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) to demand that he delay the confirmation vote that was scheduled for Tuesday night.

Although the black women refrained from taking a clear stand of support for Hill, they expressed outrage that 98 white male senators seemed willing to vote on the nomination without a full hearing on a black woman’s sworn statement charging sexual harassment.

“We are outraged that the Senate is not taking seriously the allegations of a black woman,” Berry told an impromptu news conference.

Since then, the Senate has voted to delay the nomination to allow for an investigation of Hill’s charges.

Traditional civil rights organizations--which are led mainly by black men--have been quiet on Hill’s charges. In particular, the NAACP, which campaigned actively against the Thomas nomination, has been mute.

“I think that silence comes from a misplaced belief that, if we talk directly about these issues, we will further the cause of the defamation of blacks as a community,” Lawrence said.

“But the issue has been forced out there,” he added. “If we don’t speak to this issue ourselves, and in an honest way, it will be white people who will speak about it and mischaracterize it to our disadvantage.”