THE AMERICAN DREAM IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE CLARENCE THOMAS HEARINGS by Jane Flax. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. 190 pp. Cloth $27.50. ISBN 0-8014-3575-7.

Reviewed by Gayle Binion, Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara. Email: binion@alishaw.ucsb.edu.

For those inclined to see the activity in Congress surrounding the impeachment of President Clinton as rather surreal, I highly recommend the reading of Jane Flax, THE AMERICAN DREAM IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE CLARENCE THOMAS HEARINGS. Professor Flax takes us back to 1991 and the hearings surrounding the nomination and ultimate appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. I suggest the connection of this work to the events of the current day because it reminds us that this is not the first time that we have been treated to a congressional show of posturing around the question of someone's character and fitness for high office. Nor is it the first time that we have witnessed the "exploitation" of sexual harassment by political forces with otherwise (arguably) little concern about the matter. While I will assume that Professor Flax would be less inclined than I to characterize the rhetoric of either congressional undertaking as posturing, one can recall the political disingenuity of Senators Simpson, Spector or Hatch when one hears the presentations of their contemporary progeny among the House of Representatives' "managers" in the removal trial.

THE AMERICAN DREAM IN BLACK AND WHITE is an interesting, thoughtful and provocative analysis of the two hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary during the confirmation of Justice Thomas. Professor Flax, displaying a deft ability to interweave the skills and insights of both a political scientist and analytically-oriented psychologist, walks us through her perspective on the routine first hearing and the explosive second hearing. Her work is located in the theoretical milieu of social constructions of identity and the methodology employed is qualitative content analysis. While she is necessarily selective in the parts of the transcripts she analyzes, it appears to this reviewer (who still recalls the many hours devoted to watching the hearings and to providing on-air commentary on them for a television station) that she has effectively captured a significant stream of the political ideology that marked their conduct.

It was of course at the second hearing, an action demanded by, inter alia, women members of the House of Representatives, that accusations of sexual harassment against Thomas were presumably under review. While, unlike numerous other academic and journalistic books on the subject of what has come to be called the Hill-Thomas hearings, Flax is not focused on determining who "told the truth," her psychopolitical analysis leaves little doubt about the appropriate inferences to be drawn from her work. The imperative of Thomas' confirmation, deriving from the structure of racial and gendered power in American society, was never in doubt in Flax's view, an observation which suggests that Hill's accusations would not and could not be given an honest evaluation in the Senate. What Flax demonstrates, with verbatim reference to the written record of the testimony, is that the dialogues that occurred during both hearings reflect and reinforce white male supremacy and the American myth of abstract individualism.

Flax's thesis is that the tenets of American liberalism were in bas relief throughout the hearings. Liberalism's sociopolitical structures of identity, and hierarchies of power, which were challenged by the Thomas nomination and subsequently by Hill's charges against him, had to be defended by the Senators. Republicans and Democrats alike sought serially to locate Judge Thomas and Professor Hill within a framework which fit the needs of the dominant social and political ideology of the country, and of themselves as privileged holders of political power. The liberal ideology shared by the Senators of both parties was stronger than was the minor partisan difference between them on the question of confirmation. Liberalism, first and perhaps foremost, requires that each person be understood as an abstract disembodied individual without defining characteristics reflective of either race or gender and similarly undefined by external circumstance of class. Resting her analysis on a perspective similar to that of Carole Pateman in THE SEXUAL CONTRACT, Flax suggests that the deconstructed liberal individual, who is a party to the social contract, is a white male. To confirm Judge Thomas the Senators needed to render him "an honorary white man." But within this process, Flax notes an irony. The Senators simultaneously made much of Thomas' race and poverty and the obstacles he overcame by virtue of his character. This served to reinforce Horatio Alger mythology about the openness of American society and to highlight the significance of individual agency. Both Thomas and his most ardent supporters, in dismissing the significance of social institutions in understanding a human life, took no account of affirmative action policies in facilitating Thomas' professional advancement. Affirmative action, which allows women and minorities to challenge white male entitlement to positions of authority and casts doubt on what is essentially unearned white male privilege, had to be rejected as a factor in Thomas' life. Thus, Senators could use these superficially conflicting philosophies to support the world view they found most comfortable, that each individual can make his way in American society. While obstacles of racial prejudice were acknowledged to exist, the institutionalized barriers of such were deemed to be a relic of the past and circumscribed to the South. Those with the internal strength of character and blessed with a strong patriarchal role model (in Thomas' case, a mythically important grandfather) can and do succeed. In sum, the Senators could support the Thomas nomination by seeing him not as a threat to white male privilege but as proof of the legitimacy of the system, a system safely under the control of white men. Through what many observers would characterize as patronizing treatment, but Flax puts into a context of having far greater ideological importance, the Senators could allow Thomas to construct himself as a disembodied rational mind.

Unlike Clarence Thomas, Professor Anita Hill, the thirteenth child of a poor farming family in Oklahoma, was treated to no such parallel respect for her impressive accomplishments in life. The Judiciary Committee had already constructed and anointed Thomas during the first hearing and thus at all cost had to destroy the credibility of Anita Hill at the hearing on her claims of harassment. That Hill was an involuntary witness, drawn into the national limelight by virtue of answering questions put to her by government agents checking into Thomas' background, was irrelevant to the Senators. She posed a threat to male political hegemony and had to be neutralized. This was accomplished by constructing for Hill an identity with several, arguably conflicting, elements. She was simultaneously portrayed as a shrewd and manipulative lawyer, a malicious woman, a pawn of leftist operatives, a frustrated spinster whose sexual advances were scorned, and a woman given to fantasizing about men. Whichever of this litany of weaknesses one chose to accept, the Thomas supporters needed only to conclude that her testimony could not be believed. The treatment of Professor Hill differed from that of Thomas not only with respect to denying her respect for overcoming racial/gender/class obstacles, but also in two other significant ways. While declaring off-limits any exploration of Thomas' personal habits (for example his alleged penchant for consuming pornography), Hill's personal life was put under a microscope. This included, but was not limited to, inviting ludicrous testimony from one John Doggett who claimed that Hill exhibited quasi-stalking behaviors toward men, and was essentially a social outcast. Finally, the Senators on the Judiciary Committee invited Thomas in rebuttal to explore what Hill's motives were in (falsely) accusing him. This opened for Thomas the opportunity to describe Hill as a metaphoric child of his, whom he treasured and helped, and who had for reasons unknown to him, turned on him. In contrast, Hill had not been asked why Thomas would have lied; nor did they ask Hill what motivation she might have had to be honest. Liberalism's imperative had been accomplished; the Committee had succeeded in disposing of a threat to male hegemony.

Flax concludes the book with a plea for a reexamination of social constructions of the individual in American society and it is here that the book displays both strength and limitations. The strength is in her analytic critique of identity politics as being a variant on the same logic as abstract individualism; they simply differ in their ideal subject. Identity politics idealizes the concrete person in place of the abstract one. While she argues throughout that abstract individualism serves to justify power arrangements, implied, but less explicit, is that identity politics may be a source of disempowerment. Ultimately, she argues, to have a shared future in a diverse society there must be a greater appreciation of the multiplicity of individuals and the social solidarity that empathy across these myriad aspects of the individual can yield. The ultimate goal of her coda is to acknowledge that the divisions of race and gender and the power inequities that accompany them are inherently arbitrary and multiplicity theory will serve to demonstrate this. As political theorizing the conclusion is interesting and offers a set of persuasive observations, although I do not necessarily agree with her critique of identity politics as individualistic in nature. Limiting, however, is the conclusion's significance for a fuller comprehension of the behavior and the events described and analyzed in the body of the text. While her analysis of the hearings offers an intriguing conceptual framework within which to place an important moment in American history, the last chapter of the work suggests the virtue of seeing individuals in a different way. There is, thus, a not totally satisfying meshing of the two themes.

Copyright 1995