A law professor who told the Senate Judiciary Committee, on 11 October 1991, what she said a nominee to the Supreme Court had done when she worked for him. She said what was done, said she had not wanted to say it, and said why she was saying it. The room made her the subject. He was confirmed four days later.
🜃
She introduced herself in one sentence: my name is Anita F. Hill, and I am a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. She had been born in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma, in 1956, the youngest of thirteen children of farmers. She had worked for Clarence Thomas at the Department of Education and then followed him to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when he became its chairman: the agency charged with enforcing the law against discrimination at work.
In the autumn of 1991 he was the President's nominee to the Supreme Court. Her account of his conduct toward her reached the committee, and on 11 October she gave it, under oath, on national television, to a committee of fourteen men.
She was asked to testify about the man who had run the agency that enforces the law she was describing.
[See THE HATRED OF THE COMPETENT WOMAN · CREDIBILITY DEFICIT]
🜃
HOW SHE CLOSED
She ended her statement this way: It would have been more comfortable to remain silent. I took no initiative to inform anyone. But when I was asked by a representative of this committee to report my experience, I felt that I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.
It is testimony in its oldest form. What was done, said once. That she did not seek to say it. Why she said it anyway. No ranking of anyone, no claim to be owed anything. She came to the house only because the house asked, and told it what it had asked to know.
[See DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY · EVE]
🜃
THE NAMER BECAME THE PROBLEM
What followed was not an answer to what she said. Members of the committee questioned her credibility, her motives and her state of mind, on the record and on camera, and the hearing became a hearing about her.
Thomas, answering, called the proceedings a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves. The phrase drew on a real history, the killing of Black men on accusations, and it placed Hill, a Black woman giving testimony she had been asked for, in the position of the mob. The accused arrived as the one being destroyed, and the woman who had named him was moved into the place of the crowd, which is the third move of the sequence run with the oldest charge in the country's record.
[See DARVO · LYNCHING · THE NAMER BECOMES THE PROBLEM]
🜃
THE SQUAWK, HEARD IN THE HOUSE'S OWN ROOM
She spoke where she was asked to speak, to the body deciding the question, in the form it set. That form could hold one thing: a contest of credibility between two people. Every hour of the hearing converted what she reported into that contest, his account against hers, and a contest of that kind is settled by whose account the room is already disposed to receive.
On 15 October 1991 the Senate confirmed him, fifty-two to forty-eight, the narrowest margin for a Supreme Court nomination since the nineteenth century. The forum heard her as a dispute about the score, because a dispute about the score was the only thing its rules had a vote for.
[See INSTITUTIONAL DARVO · TONE POLICING · THE SQUAWK]
🜃
THE OBJECTION THAT HAS TO BE MET
He denied it, under oath. The hearing reached no finding of fact, and the Senate's vote was not a verdict on her account. An entry that treats her account as established decides what no tribunal decided.
The entry does not decide the conduct. It reads what the hearing did with the naming, and that can be read without deciding who was right. The test is whether the response answered what she said or produced a finding about her. The record shows a hearing that spent its questions on her credibility, her motive and her mind, and a reply from the accused that recast the one who testified as a mob, and that is the shape of the relocation whatever the truth of the conduct was.
🜃
She said she could not keep silent. The room's reply was about her.
The questions are what the record of that week holds, and they were questions about her.
🜃
RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
