99 New: The Good Old Days

The 7:30 a.m. executive meetings killed me. I had two small children and getting them up, dressed, fed, and delivered to day care was a regular Monday morning nightmare. But I’d wanted for years to have the job I had at Milwaukee’s anti-poverty agency. It was a big deal job with a salary I’d never imagined earning and an office on the 14th floor with windows looking out over the city of Milwaukee. It was delicious.

I can remember where I was sitting when we discussed the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill ‘situation’ as my male colleagues called it. My boss, the Executive Director of the organization, was African-American. He sat across from me, a heavy cherry wood table between us. We were working in an anti-poverty agency but the boss had decided that didn’t mean we should have a shoddy, government-issue, gray metal desk look. He bought us all fancy furniture and painted the walls mauve. It made the job even more delicious since I could fight poverty in a deluxe office.

“He’s right. It is a high-tech lynching,” my boss said, echoing Clarence Thomas’ famous statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee after Anita Hill detailed instances of sexual harassment in their working relationship. He waited for a response, not just from me but from all five of us in the meeting. The others nodded in affirmation. Our boss was a powerful guy, very charismatic, definite in what he thought but oddly open to hearing other points of view. He would prevail in the end but he did listen, I’ll give him that. Except I had nothing to say, not even a nod to offer.

I didn’t know what I thought. Working in a black agency, it was tricky business being very critical of a black man, especially a famous, accomplished man like Clarence Thomas. Had I wanted to be critical, which I wasn’t sure I did. I’d watched the news reports of the Senate hearings, seen plenty of Anita Hill’s testimony and Clarence Thomas’ response. But I didn’t know what I thought about it. I didn’t know if it was or wasn’t a high-tech lynching.

Part of me thought she should have thrown her coffee at him and walked out of the room when he pointed out pubic hair on the soda can. Why did she tolerate that behavior, I thought, immediately shifting responsibility for the harassment to her rather than keeping it focused on the man doing the harassment. I almost reflexively  blamed her for getting herself into such a situation. Looking back, it amazes me that I could be so equivocal, so hesitant to defend a woman who was merely doing her job, trying to have a professional life. Like me.

Blaming the victim was what we did then. That’s what we’d been trained to do with all the talk about not being a tease and not expecting a man to control himself once, you know, he got going. We were supposed to shut down crude comments, but in a nice way so as not to hurt a guy’s feelings, and we were always responsible for monitoring the situation, the lights, the drinks, the distance, the dress, the look, the eyebrow. It – whatever it turned out to be – was all on us. We were responsible. We were to blame.

I thought of that early morning meeting today. It came roaring back like it was yesterday.