Casualties of court wars
Two women, one white, one black, both disbelieved
Reflecting on the continuing controversies surrounding the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, I cannot help but recall Sen. Susan Collins articulating out loud the duplicitous position previously murmured by some Republicans in response to the sworn testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, who alleged she had been sexually assaulted by Justice Kavanaugh. Ms. Ford said she was “100 percent” certain that Justice Kavanaugh had attacked her when they were teenagers in the 1980s. Although Ms. Ford is a distinguished research psychologist and college professor at two respected universities, Ms. Collins pronounced her crazy.
The senator defied credulity during her tortured 40minute explanation on CNN of her vote to confirm Justice Kavanaugh. She said she believed Ms. Ford had been molested but not that Justice Kavanaugh had done it. Many confused Americans regarded this novel approach by this woman in power toward a powerless woman as progress.
This thinking goes that Ms. Ford was accorded some measure of sympathy that was denied Anita Hill back when she testified to sexual harassment by Justice Clarence Thomas. The credible white lady accusing the white gentleman in 2018 was treated by the Senate Judiciary Committee like ... a white lady accusing a white gentleman. Not so in the Hill/Thomas confrontation before the committee in 1991.
Anita Hill, a law professor and Yale Law School graduate, was as respected and respectable as Ms. Ford. During the Thomas confirmation hearing, Ms. Hill testified that Justice Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and earlier.
Ms. Hill and Justice Thomas are African-American. And with Democrats, such as the feckless 1991 Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Joe Biden, disgracing themselves at the committee hearing on Ms. Hill’s explosive charges, you didn’t need Republicans. Before a riveted America and with seemingly prurient interest, Mr. Biden coaxed Ms. Hill to tell her truths in graphic detail.
In measured tones, Ms. Hill obliged the disrespectful Judiciary chair and his shameless committee of white men. The hearing revealed official Washington’s late 20th-century installment of the ancient narrative of powerful white men’s microscopic fascination with black humans’ sexuality. Racists, pedophiles and rapists President Thomas Jefferson and South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, each of whom sired a child by a black woman-child, are notorious historical exemplars of the phenomenon.
The Senate’s transgressions against Ms. Hill’s modesty was the most prominent display in the 1990s. Outraged at being outed, his confirmation at stake, Justice Thomas dismissed it all as a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” He might more aptly have labeled the white male senators’ stag party a congressional stripsearch of a dignified black woman. Removing any doubt about the underlying realities of the tragic contretemps, right-wing huckster David Brock proclaimed Ms. Hill “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”
To black America — particularly professional black females — the distinction between the “Faberge egg” treatment of Ms. Ford, as the White House described America’s surface respect for her sensibilities, compared to the soft-core pornographic interrogation of Ms. Hill, is evidence of discriminatory treatment between two female victims.
As the politics of the divided States of America go, however, that contradiction is a distinction without a difference. Twenty-seven years apart, Republican white men of raw power in the White House and in the Senate, abetted by Democrat enablers, were determined that accused sexual predators Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas would be on the Supreme Court.
Irrespective of the invidious disparate treatment of the primary accusers 27 years apart, the result is the same. Both of the accused sex offenders ferociously disputed their accusers and today sit on the Supreme Court, endowed with lifelong tenure.
Of course, the white Justice Kavanaugh is a cardcarrying member of the ruling class, to the manor born. But Justice Thomas?
In March 1991, a black man, unruly in the streets of Los Angeles, was criminally brutalized by police. His name was Rodney King. By October that year, Clarence Thomas, unruly in a Washington hearing room, was elevated to a seat on the nation’s highest tribunal. Advancing the agenda of the right-wing power elite, deriding other black folks along the way, Justice Thomas was rendered an honorary white man.
As for Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, neither is a nut or a slut. Nor are they liars. On the contrary, they are among the finest citizens our flawed nation has produced.
Susan Collins may not be the most unashamed dissembler in the Senate. That status places Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Orin Hatch — a not-too trumpeted Pittsburgh native — in pitched competition. But this Republican quartet claimed to believe Ms. Ford, regardless of their bareknuckled political chicanery.
Notwithstanding, Ms. Collins, dancing on the strings of the other three puppeteers, debased herself by duplicitously asserting that the believable Ms. Ford was too nutty to know that Brett Kavanaugh was the drunk who attempted to rape her, even though his drunken laughter and that of his drunken accused accomplice had been encoded for life in her hippocampus.
One famous honorary white who escaped justice for some 50 years — imprisoned sex offender Bill Cosby, formerly America’s dad — ran but could not hide. Nor can perverted justices.