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Race Trumps Gender: The Thomas Nomination in the Black Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Jane Mansbridge  and
Katherine Tate
Jane Mansbridge
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Katherine Tate
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Race and gender are intimately intertwined in the lives of Black women in the United States. Race constructs the way Black women experience gender; gender constructs the way Black women experience race. In the Senate hearings that pitted the word of Clarence Thomas against the sexual harassment accusations of Anita Hill, the great majority of Black women did not believe Hill's accusations. Our analysis will set this disbelief against a background of substantial Black unity on political issues in the United States, Black feminism, television coverage of the event, and Black women's reactions to that television coverage.

Contrary to the conclusion one might reasonably form from the primary White composition of all the major feminist organizations, Black women have usually given stronger support to the women's movement than Whites on surveys (see Table for self-identification as “feminist”). Even as early as 1970, 60% of Black women said they supported efforts to strengthen women's status in society, compared to only 37% of White women (Klein 1987: 26), and in 1972 67% said they were sympathetic to women's liberation groups, compared to only 35% of White women (hooks 1981: 148). Also contravening the impression one might form from the composition of feminist organizations, poor women and working class women are as likely as middle-class women to say on these surveys that they consider themselves “feminist.” The survey data are supported by indepth interviews among all classes of Black women.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , September 1992 , pp. 488 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1992

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Footnotes

*

The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Kathleen Frankovic of the New York Times; John Brennan of the Los Angeles Times; the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut, which provided data from USA Today/Gordon Black, ABC News, Gallup and Yankelovich Clancy Shulman; and the Russell Sage Foundation and the Survey Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, which supported our work. We thank Eileen McDonagh for comments on an earlier draft of this article. This article draws on a longer analysis by Katharine Tate in “Invisible Woman,” The American Prospect (Winter 1992), pp. 74–81.

References

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