Dear Anita

Dear Anita,

My name is Professor Elsa Barkley Brown and I am writing to you today in somewhat of a late fashion, seeking your blessing or at least your acceptance. You see, I used your suit against Clarence Thomas as one of my primary examples in my article, “ ‘What Has Happened Here’ : The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,” because I believe your story is a powerful example of the harmfulness of linear historical narratives. In your story I saw a larger story waiting to break through, or rather, not a story, but a part of larger story made up of many complex layers, of which yours is small but key.

I admire you, Anita. I see what you must have seen, must have felt—that on your shoulders rested not merely the plight of the working woman, but the plight of the high-achieving Black woman, one who “achieved” the so-called American Dream, one who was one of thirteen children of Oklahoma farmers yet who graduated from Yale Law School. The event of the trial did not occur in isolation (though that it how it has been widely portrayed), but rather in dialogue with myriad other events and people. Your trial has been standardized, has been used to discuss the problems of being a woman and a woman who works in a male-dominated environment and the dangers that are often inherent with that position. Yet you are not merely a woman, stripped of racial identity and historical context but a woman who was operating within the circumstances in which you were born and raised. With your case, you must have “recognized that speaking of the particularities of Thomas’s harassment… had the potential to restigmatize the whole Black community—male and female.” (306). You had to implicitly acknowledge that you would all of a sudden be thrust into a historical narrative not of your own creation, one that has inflicted gross generalizations for centuries. It was not just a matter of you being a woman, but of you being a Black woman. This fundamental fact is something that the National Organization for Women, the feminist legal scholar Catharine McKinnon, and others failed to recognize even in their eloquent discussions of the realities of sexual harassment in the lives of women. In abstracting your experience to the “women’s experience” as a whole, they persisted in perpetuating a deracialized notion of women’s experience without an acknowledgement of your intersecting identities. You carried the weight of history on your shoulders, the history of sexual harassment as intrinsic to Black women’s labor (303-304) and yet you shed the burden of concealment for social acceptance and in that paved the way for this conversation.

How will we reconcile collective memory and common history if there are to be many fewer generalizations? Will there still be a place to discuss “women’s” issues at large, or is that a folly ignorant of important social factors. My article points in the direction of the latter but in the time since writing it, I have begun to think that there may be some sort of balance that can be achieved. Perhaps there are some common experiences within gender groups, though in discussion they must necessarily be complicated and layered by issues of race and class. Perhaps there is a way to acknowledge multiple identities while still feeling some connection to a large cross-section of humanity, rather than just a small subset of it. I’m not yet sure what my set opinion is, or if I will ever have one. Please feel free to write to me with any thoughts you may have.

With many thanks,

Elsa