Sex and Justice Response

Colin Baker

3/3/16

Clarence Thomas believed his hearing was a high tech lynching. Despite Anita Hill also being black he thought her allegations were rooted in racism and she was basing her claims of the stereotype of a black male as a sexual being. However I personally don’t believe there’s any connection between an employee claiming her boss was sexually harassing her to a modern or “high-tech” version of public executions. Clarence Thomas believed his character and reputation was being publicly executed by false allegations however there was absolutely no proof that Hill’s claims were fabricated. I think Thomas played the racism card to invalidate Hill’s accusations to the committee, which really hindered her as the committee already treated her with extreme skepticism. Most of the committee previously knew Thomas and believed that they knew him well enough to know that he would never sexually harass Anita Hill. Some of the Democrats on the panel questioned Thomas more intensely but not nearly to the same degree as Anita Hill.

In the 1950’s the Red Scare was sweeping the U.S. as the Soviet Union rose to be as one of the biggest world powers post World War 2. As the threat of Soviet Russia grew so did people’s fear of communism. As a part of the Red Scare, Joseph McCarthy, a republican Senator from Wisconsin accused and held hearings for multiple government employees that he believed were communists that supported the overthrow of the government. However I see little to no connection between the McCarthy trials and Clarence Thomas’s trial. During Thomas’s trial many of the senator’s on the committee gave Thomas the benefit of the doubt and were extremely skeptical of Anita Hill’s claims. In the McCarthy trials, those accused had to prove their innocence even with little or no evidence to show that they were communist. Those accused were questioned intensely and treated with hostility. Many of those accused had their reputations ruined forever while Clarence Thomas went on to become a Supreme Court Justice.