Sexual Harassment 20 Years Later

The New York Times
Editorial
Published: October 21, 2011

Twenty years ago this month, Anita Hill stepped into the glare of the national spotlight, testifying before the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee about the vulgar sexual advances she said she endured a decade earlier while working at two governThose hearings brought into the open the problem of sexual harassment — an issue that millions of women privately recognized but rarely discussed. For many, having a way to define and label the behavior was empoweringment agencies for Clarence Thomas, the nominee to the Supreme Court.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/opinion/sexual-harassment-20-years-later.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&src=recg&adxnnlx=1319275258-i8mEVJ0lNORXTyba0gguLg

Justice Thomas Says Constitution Forbids Racial Preference

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sep 10, 2008, 21:08

WASHINGTON
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday that African-Americans are better served by colorblind programs than affirmative action.
Thomas, addressing leaders of historically Black colleges, said affirmative action "has become this mantra and there almost has become this secular religiosity about it. I think it almost trumps thinking."
A longtime opponent of race-based preferences in hiring and school admissions, Thomas said, "Just from a constitutional standpoint, I think we're going to run into problems if we say the Constitution says we can consider race sometimes."
Thomas, 60, has voted on the court to outlaw the use of race in college admissions and in determining which public schools students will attend. He wrote with evident resentment in his autobiography "My Grandfather's Son" that he felt he was allowed to attend Yale Law School in the 1970s because of his race and took a tough course load to prove he was as able as his White classmates.
"My suggestion would be to stop the buzz words and to focus more on the practical effect of what we're doing," he said Tuesday.
"I can tell you when you have fudge words, it leaves a lot of room for mischief," he said. "People have a tendency to read their personal opinions into fudge words. You want, when it comes to the issue of race, absolute words." [To read the entire story, go to: http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_11663.shtml ]

Did Affirmative Action Really Hinder Clarence Thomas?

LAW.COM
Tamara Loomis
06-02-2008

Why couldn't Clarence Thomas get a job with a big-city law firm when he graduated from Yale in 1974? It's not an idle question. That "time of dashed hopes and expectations," as Thomas once described it in a speech, still leaves him bitter. His frustration resonates in the autobiography that he published last fall, "My Grandfather's Son."
Thomas blames Yale Law School -- specifically, its affirmative action program, which sought to give up to 10 percent of first-year spots to minorities -- for his difficulties securing a job as a first-year associate. Thomas has not disclosed the firms to which he applied, or how many, but he says that after applying for jobs at firms in four different cities, he was rejected everywhere.
"I'd learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it," Thomas writes in his memoir. "I'd graduated from one of America's top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value." To this day, he has kept a "15 cents" sticker from a cigar package stuck to his diploma, "to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale."
Shortly after he arrived at the law school, Thomas writes, he realized that "blacks who benefited from [affirmative action admissions] were being judged by a double standard." As a result, Thomas writes, his law degree was basically worthless, since it "bore the taint of racial preference."
But interviews with a dozen black lawyers who attended Yale in the same years paint a strikingly different picture. "I don't want to discredit Clarence's viewpoint. But his focus on Yale is somewhat disingenuous," says classmate David Jones (Yale Law School 1974), voicing a common theme among those interviewed. "And to make [affirmative action] out to be some kind of liberal conspiracy is certainly disingenuous."
Jones says that Yale "could have done better" administering its affirmative action program in those early years, but any suggestion that black students were treated differently is "crap." In fact, those interviewed describe the environment at Yale in largely positive -- even glowing -- terms. "It was a terrific education," says Wendy Samuel (YLS 1974). "There wasn't the heavy competition you'd expect from a school of its caliber. People were very supportive."
As for Thomas' argument that Yale's affirmative action program made his law degree worthless? "Bullshit," says Daniel Johnson, Jr., a partner at the San Francisco office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius and a 1973 graduate of the school. "I know [African-American law students at Yale] who got job offers all over the country."
Among those interviewed for this story, some got their top pick, and others didn't, but all of them got a job in the sector -- public, private or public interest -- of their choice. His classmates suggest that a variety of factors might have played into Thomas' search process, including grades, expectations, background and experience, as well as racism. Only Thomas has blamed affirmative action.
Pointing to the "extraordinary success" of the black lawyers who attended Yale in the early 1970s, Johnson says, "We should be celebrating affirmative action at Yale Law School. Affirmative action at Yale really worked." The most telling piece of evidence: one U.S. Supreme Court justice. [To read the entire article, go to: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202421827466 ]

The justice run amok

The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist October 9, 2007

THE BITTERNESS in Clarence Thomas makes you wonder if he ever can realize that he won. It is 16 years since he was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite charges of sexual harassment by Anita Hill. For a decade and a half, in one of the most unassailable seats in the world, he has exercised power that affects millions of Americans.
That appears not to be enough for him. In his new memoir, Thomas fights the Hill accusations like a punch-drunk boxer. It did not matter that, as he himself wrote, the opinion polls immediately after the extraordinary Thomas-Hill hearings "tilted decisively - even lopsidedly - in my favor."
Despite being comfortably entrenched in a conservative wing of the court that is doing a good deal of what it was appointed to do in turning back the clock on the legal rights of millions of disadvantaged Americans, Thomas writes as if time stood still. Though most Americans who opposed his nomination have long been forced into a resigned shrug over his votes, Thomas spends a curious amount of time throwing dirt on Hill's professional reputation.
Going back to 1982, Thomas called Hill, today a Brandeis University professor, a "growing nuisance" when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. He said a staffer "told me that Anita wasn't performing up to expectations and failed to finish her assignments on time. I hadn't realized her work was so deficient." He said, "I'd also noticed Anita's rude attitude toward other members of my staff - and it had been bothering me as well that she seemed far too interested in my social calendar."
Thomas said when he passed over Hill for a promotion, she "stormed into my office" and accused Thomas of favoring light-skinned black women. Thomas said he helped Hill get a faculty position at Oral Roberts Law School partially because he saw it as a chance "to solve a problem of my own."
When Thomas was first told by the FBI about Hill's accusations during his confirmation process, he said he told the agents "her work at EEOC had been mediocre." Thomas wrote that when he wondered to himself why Hill was making these charges, he said, "I also knew from working with Anita that she was touchy and apt to overreact. If I or anyone else had done the slightest thing to offend her, she would have complained loudly and instantly, not waited for a decade to make her displeasure known."
Thomas even threw in a dig at Hill's politics. "I remembered how she'd said at our first meeting that she 'detested' Ronald Reagan - and I'd found her political views to be both stereotypically left of center and uninformed."
Why Thomas felt compelled to go over this again is anyone's guess. What is known is that the charges made him run to the very closet of victimhood that he famously accused black civil rights leaders of hiding in. His stunning, nationally televised response to Hill's charges was a declaration that he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching."
In "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas," a biography also published this year, Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post concluded, "Thomas wears his blackness like a heavy robe that both enobles and burdens him. The problem of color is a mantle he yearns to shed, even as he clings to it."

[To read the rest of the opinion editorial, go to: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/10/09/the_justice_run_amok/ ]

Commentary: Clarence Thomas has a right to be angry

By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Special to CNN

SAN DIEGO, California -- Many Americans have a blind spot when it comes to black conservatives. They don't have the foggiest idea what makes these people tick.
And they blew their chance to learn more during the October 1991 confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Instead, there were those who tried to destroy someone who dared to think for himself.
For instance, Thomas opposes affirmative action, the very program that his critics insist was solely responsible for his admission into Yale Law School.
White liberals frown on independent thinking by minorities. Some of them claimed that Thomas was pulling up the ladder behind him and so they pulled the rug out from under him. These are the folks who claim credit for the success of those minorities they agree with while trying to discredit those with whom they disagree.
That reminds me. One popular misconception is that African-Americans who gravitate toward the Republican Party do so because they agree with the GOP on the issues, perhaps in support of tax cuts or in opposition to same-sex marriage. But, from my dealings with black conservatives, I can tell you that -- for many of them -- their rightward drift began as a reaction to the condescension on the left.
You saw some of that during Thomas' confirmation hearing. And you're seeing more of it now in the reaction to his searing memoir, "My Grandfather's Son." The book gives Thomas' side of the story about his confirmation and the woman, Anita Hill, who almost derailed it with accusations of sexual harassment.
But it also gives his liberal critics more ammunition. Their rap against the guy used to be that he wasn't angry enough over centuries of injustice against African-Americans. Now, they're insisting that he's too angry: at them and at the way he was treated.
Left-of-center Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus writes that the book seems to "pulsate with Thomas' rage." The liberal Frank Rich of The New York Times judges Thomas to be "full of unreconstructed racial bitterness."

[To read the entire commentary, go to: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/09/navarrette/index.html ]