Complicity In The Boys Club Is Entrenched | Consider Joe Biden In The Supreme Court Confirmation Of Clarence Thomas

/

Complicity In The Boys Club Is Entrenched | Consider Joe Biden In The Supreme Court Confirmation Of Clarence Thomas

Writing for New York Magazine's The Cut this week, Rebecca Traister raised a delicate issue, one that simmers in the minds of many Democratic women.  Traister questions just how many times we must go through these grand national revelations of male misbehavior. Last year it was Trump talking about grabbing women by the pussies whenever he wanted. It's a right, Trump explained, of powerful men. And then America elected the pussy grabber president -- because he promised to give America to the small group of Christians demanding a theocracy for America. Yes. To add insult to injury, America's most supposedly devout Christians made the pussy grabber president of America. 

Trump is not an isolated incident; nor is Harvey Weinstein, writes Traister. These are not unique stories of sexual harassment or sexual assault. We must come to grips with a "nuts and bolts infrastructure of gender injustice that has permitted generations -- centuries -- of this behavior, and that has worked again and again to beat back any resistance to it."

Former senator and vice president Joe Biden was the architect of the Violence Against Women Act and most recently a voice in the movement to address campus sexual assault. While many of us respect Joe Biden for all the good he has done for Americans, we also view Biden as deeply complicit in his role of "protecting the powerful" while allowing the shaming of Anita Hill for speaking truth to power. Biden silenced other witnesses who wanted to corroborate Anita Hill's allegations against Clarence Thomas in his supreme court nomination hearing. In fact, then-senator Joe Biden, who led the all-white, all-male Judiciary Committee in 1991 initially ignored Anita Hill and her desire to testify against Thomas as being fit for a position on the US Supreme Court. Traister writes:

20 Yrs After Clarence Thomas Hearing, Anita Hill Is 'Reimagining Equality'

/

20 Yrs After Clarence Thomas Hearing, Anita Hill Is 'Reimagining Equality'

Anita Hill has a new book ‘Reimagining Equality’. A series of talks and seminars focused on the anniversary of the Clarence Thomas hearings for supreme court justice have returned Hill to the soft flow of the limelight, if not the harsh glow of cameras confronting her during her testimony about her experiences dealing with Thomas as his subordinate at the Education Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The hearings also changed the trajectory of Hill’s life. The questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, then a panel of white men, was “hurtful,” she said, and she does not believe a white woman would have met the same reception. But she also said she does not regret her involvement.

Anita Hill will be delivering the keynote address at New York’s Hunter College Oct. 15 conference ‘Sex, Power, and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later.’

Many women like myself who watched the Anita Hill interrogation in horror — by a panel of only white men — were stunned by their questions and know that the Daily Beast article is not an exaggeration.

After 19 Years, Anita Hill Gets Bombshell Backup From Clarence Thomas Ex

/

Lillian McEwen didn’t decide to write a book about her relationship with Justice Clarence Thomas because Virginia Thomas left a phone message on Anita Hill’s voice mail, asking her to consider apologizing to Thomas for her sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation hearings.

Lillian McEwen, the girlfriend and confidante to Justice Thomas, has been writing her memoirs. It does seem that the Virginia Thomas phone call to Anita Hill struck a sour note, given McEwen’s own experiences with Clarence Thomas, which she has now detailed in the Washington Post.

Her words are a bombshell and basically support Anita Hill’s claims and those of several other women, whose complaints about Thomas were passed off by the Judiciary committee. Lillian McEwen was not asked to testify in the hearings, which were confined to the candidate’s professional, not personal, relationships with women.