The True Story of a Reluctant Participant

Anita Hill’s autobiography, “Speaking Truth to Power,” is an almost perfect example of a negative dialectic. The characteristics that served Hill so well during her vicious questioning by the Judiciary Committee in the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings--her restraint, her poise, her almost supra-natural control, her unshakable commitment to the high road, her lack of anger, vengeance, or, indeed, noticeable emotion of any kind--are turned on their head. The result is a work so muted that it borders on dissociation. Anita Hill may have written the first Valium Nation memoir.

Hill’s sobriety and her strength are deeply rooted in her family history. Looking at a photograph of her grandparents, she describes how they stand “tall and straight,” “unsmiling,” “stiff-backed,” “serious.” Hill’s parents and grandparents were farmers; her great-grandparents were slaves. Hill, the youngest of 13 children, grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tar-paper house. But she describes an idyllic childhood, in which her family provided a “marvelously rich world of human interaction” that “more than made up for what we lacked in cultural experience.” Not incidentally, Hill was the valedictorian of her (integrated) high school, from which she graduated in 1973. Politics, though, were not discussed in her home, and “the civil rights movement was a remote and abstract experience.”

Hill was never a leader--or even an activist--in the areas of civil rights or sexual harassment. Indeed, as she makes clear, she had no intention of testifying against Clarence Thomas when he was first nominated to the Supreme Court; after a period of tortured indecision, she reluctantly decided to do so, but only when it was evident that her experiences with Thomas had already been discovered, or were at least strongly suspected, by Senate investigators. Even then, she preferred not to go public, repeatedly requesting confidentiality. In short, Hill was pulled into history, largely against her will.

Hill’s account of her career, her working relationship with Thomas and the hearings themselves largely conforms to the one put forth in 1994 by investigative journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in “Strange Justice” (a book that has far more narrative drive than Hill’s own). But Hill is particularly interesting on several topics that various critics have repeatedly raised. Responding to the charge that maintaining a (distant) professional relationship with Thomas after he harassed her was “opportunistic”--a charge raised mainly by ambitious, successful politicians and ambitious, successful journalists--Hill reasonably points out, “I had performed well as his assistant, and I refused to let his bad behavior cheat me of every benefit of my good work.” She notes that maintaining a nice, seemingly normal relationship with Thomas was, paradoxically, an act of both self-delusion and affirmation: “By pretending that my departure from the EEOC was cordial, I denied to myself the significance of the harassment. But by staying in touch subsequently, I regained . . . professional decorum.” And to those who have berated Hill for failing to live up to their notion of a warrior feminist, Hill states simply, “I . . . chose not to file a complaint. I had every right to make that choice.”

Hill is most revealing, and moving, when discussing her painful rift with the black community, whose sustenance was never politically contingent--at least for her. “More than the racism, it was the culture of the black rural community from which I derived my identity,” she writes. “ . . . the food, the music, the language were all uniquely black and often uniquely rural. I knew who I was.” After the hearings, though, “the source of my social and psychological identity” became a source of torment, the condemnations “made all the worse because my protest involved matters of sexuality.” In the book’s most controversial section, Hill claims that an unspoken law of black solidarity is “You must protest if a white person calls you a ‘nigger,’ but you must not complain if a black man calls you a ‘whore.’ ”

The Hill-Thomas hearings irrevocably changed the life of a woman who, in her own words, is “slow, methodical, and lacks charisma.” In her post-Washington life (which includes leaving a tenured teaching job due to political pressure), Hill writes that she has “become the female counterpart of Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’ I was obvious, but my humanity was not. . . .” It is not clear, though, that this detached account will make that humanity visible--to either critics or supporters. Hill has written a book that undoubtedly contains much truth, but it is hard to say exactly where its power lies.