Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality.

A minor thought-experiment: First, imagine 18 essays on the Dreyfus case which begin with the assumption that Dreyfus was guilty. Next, assume that these essays were written in the main by Jews, but Jews hostile to Dreyfus on the grounds that he had betrayed his people by joining the French Army and adopting its anti-Semitic outlook. Finally, suppose that these essayists had constructed a series of elaborate theories on Jews and society to account for the disturbing fact that most Jews, and indeed most gentiles, persisted in the erroneous belief that Dreyfus was innocent.

This book gives some idea of what such essays would be like. It is a collection of 18 articles--by Ivy League academics who are mostly black, feminist, and politically correct -on the 1991 U.S. Senate hearings that revolved around Professor Anita Hill's allegations that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had subjected her to unwelcome sexual attentions ton years previously when she had been his assistant. Talking about pornographic films (one of Miss Hill's charges) might seem less heinous than treason. But the Hill-Thomas affair divided America quite as bitterly as the Dreyfus affair had divided France.

It still does. For, unlike the Dreyfus case, the Hill-Thomas scandal remains unresolved. Dreyfus's innocence was indisputably established; but no one knows for certain whether Anita Hill was lying when she alleged sexual harassment, or Clarence Thomas was lying when he denied it. There is simply not enough evidence to reach a conclusive verdict either way.

But the 18 contributors are not concerned with facts in any such vulgar sense. None of them tries to assemble the evidence for Miss Hill and against Mr. Thomas, and certainly not vice versa. They assume Mr. Thomas's duplicity and Miss Hill's rectitude and, that done, go on to consider deeper questions. For instance, if Clarence Thomas was the servile black agent of the Republican establishment's white racism--Man Friday to Mr. Bush's Robinson Crusoe in Toni Morrison's ambitious introduction--why did the polls show him to be supported by most blacks? And, since Anita Hill was plainly tolling the truth, why did two-thirds of women disbelieve her?

The answers they give-with a taste for sheer repetition which most readers are unlikely to share--is that the Bush Administration, Judge Thomas himself, and the "corporate media" cleverly exploited various popular myths and stereotypes about race and sex to blur and override the truth both of Miss Hill's allegations and of Mr. Thomas's unfitness for the court.

Only one example they cite is likely to sway a disinterested critic: namely, that Clarence Thomas resorted to such manipulation when he trumped Miss Hill's charge of sexual harassment with his own claim that he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching" before millions of people on television. As the authors argue, "lynching" is a term that immediately evoked memories of black men being hanged without a trial because they had been accused of making sexual advances to a (white) woman. This rallied black support and cowed the white liberals on the Judiciary Committee. In the contemporary media game of "Musical Victims," Mr. Thomas had seized the last chair.

But was Judge Thomas wrong to defend himself in this way? Fighting against an allegation of sexual harassment which, while it could neither be proved nor disproved, nonetheless condemned him in the court of public opinion, he responded with an accusation that put his accusers at a similar disadvantage. That was certainly shrewd. Whether it was also cynical and dishonest depends entirely on whether he or Miss Hill was telling the truth.

Only because the authors assume his guilt are they able to denounce his tactics. In a trial, whether an accused person is judged guilty is determined by whether a fact is true or an inference valid. In this book, a fact is judged true or an inference valid if it confirms Judge Thomas's viciousness and Professor Hill's virtue.

This topsy-turvy logic continues throughout. For instance, when Mr. Thomas is quoted describing his rise from poverty, we are told that as the son of the household, he was almost certainly "privileged." Are all black sons of households thus privileged? We are certainly not given that impression by the rest of the book. And when Miss Hill describes her poor but loving and pious parents, no stern accusation of advantage follows.

Indeed, Nellie Y. McKay's picture of Miss Hill as "in her quiet dignity ... in the splendor of her own radiance . . . an unconquered African-American queen ..." conveys the image of virtuous feminist celebrity that Miss Hill acquired in the Senate hearings and has retained among her admirers ever since. Miss Morrison's introduction would have been more faithful to the book if the fable she had selected for comparison had been "Beauty and the Beast." Such relentless partiality is bad enough. When the authors turn to "the Construction of Social Reality," however, they move entirely into the realm of Fancy. In their account, this "Social Reality" is an artificial construction drawn from myths and stereotypes. It is in the light of these that the public interprets the world around it. And since the powers-that-be, however defined, are able to manipulate these myths as Clarence Thomas manipulated the "lynching" metaphor, what we think we see is an Establishment presentation of social reality rather than the real thing. The authors set out to deconstruct this false edifice and to demystify the techniques used to sustain it.

Wahneema Lubiano, for instance, sees the New York Times's placement of Judge Thomas's photograph above Miss Hill's in these terms: "In this photographic arrangement, the missionary position is assumed, or resumed, male on top, female on bottom. This placement, a representation of gendered power relations, was the visual harbinger of... a new 'American' hero: Clarence Thomas ... These pictures, through their timing and their spatial arrangement, were signposts for a successful set of narrative constructions, activations, and deployments by the state" (my italics). Or here is Homi K. Bhabha on the wider anthropological significance of Thomas's "high-tech lynching" remark: "Thomas offers up a lynched body as a sacrificial object--a totem meal-- shared between the senators and himself to expunge the guilt and anxiety generated by Anita Hill's charges." The general drift of these arguments is to sustain Miss Hill and to discredit Judge Thomas. But it is plain that such reasoning could be used to justify the opposite conclusion, or indeed any conclusion at all. And to do Mr. Bhabha justice, he seems to concede this when he writes: "In providing a knowledge of sexual harassment as a structural endemic condition that finds its social form as affective, even psychic reality, Hill has subtly complicated the question of 'truth.' Thomas can no longer just confirm or deny the allegations, because the widening circle of guilt makes that option futile, or purely formalistic. The very system of truth and falsity within which he operates, as part of the common culture, is rounded on the evasion of the endemic reality of women's exploitation."

Is, then, Judge Thomas innocent? Probably not. Indeed the argument here seems to be that Thomas is guilty in theory even if he is innocent in fact. And since theory is generally superior to fact, he is guilty in the sense that really matters. He is on the wrong side of a political argument.

Deconstructing Social Reality, however, is a game two can play. That the authors are in the grip of their own myths is unconsciously revealed throughout. "Feminists, of course, were unanimous in their ardent championship of Hill," writes Christine Stansell, apparently oblivious to the ironic implications of that "of course." Or consider the claim, widely trumpeted at the time and repeated several times in these essays, that Miss Hill was a "Reagan Republican." This claim (which in Mr. Thomas's case was treated as evidence of race treason) was a virtue in Miss Hill because it demonstrated that she could have no ulterior political motive for her allegations. But it turned out to be untrue: Miss Hill has since said that she was a registered Democrat all along. These essays seem unaware of her admission. It does not fit in with Social Reality as seen from the campus.

Nor have the media paid much attention to Miss Hill's admission, nor indeed to other evidence casting doubt on her credibility assembled by David Brock in The American Spectator. This somewhat undermines the crucial assumption in several essays that the media were complicit in sustaining the Establishment version of Social Reality and thus in promoting a pro-Thomas campaign. Even at the time, the television news programs and commentaries favored Miss Hill if they favored anyone; for instance, feminist law professor Catherine MacKinnon was a network "expert" on sexual harassment. What then sank Miss Hill was the coverage least controlled by the myths and stereotypes of the media elite: namely, the live unedited televising of the Senate proceedings which allowed the public to judge for itself. And what seems to have produced a greater public disposition to "believe Anita" in the 16 months since then--for no new evidence supporting Miss Hill has come to light--is the media's constant repetition of feminist claims that she was a "victim" who "spoke out" about "her experience" and thus "encouraged other women to do the same," all phrases implying Clarence Thomas's guilt.

The moral of this book is thus the opposite of its argument. The general public sees through the myths and stereotypes of a false Social Reality except when they are the only evidence it is given. It is the left-liberal intelligentsia, including its satraps in the media, which interprets specific events and particular facts in the blinding light of the general ideas to which it is attached. To minds in the grip of ideology, believing is seeing. And when such minds produce books and television news programs, what they see is what you get.

Mr. O'Sullivan is NR's editor.