Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality

By Toni Morrison

Book Overview

It was perhaps the most wretchedly aspersive race and gender scandal of recent times: the dramatic testimony of Anita Hill at the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Yet even as the televised proceedings shocked and galvanized viewers not only in this country but the world over, they cast a long shadow on essential issues that define America.

In Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison contributes an introduction and brings together eighteen provocative essays, all but one written especially for this book, by prominent and distinguished academicians--Black and white, male and female. These writings powerfully elucidate not only the racial and sexual but also the historical, political, cultural, legal, psychological, and linguistic aspects of a signal and revelatory moment in American history.

With contributions by:
Homi K. Bhabha, Margaret A. Burnham, Kimberl? Crenshaw, Paula Giddings, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Wahneema Lubiano, Manning Marable, Nellie Y. McKay, Toni Morrison, Nell Irvin Painter, Gayle Pemberton, Andrew Ross, Christine Stansell, Carol M. Swain, Michael Thelwell, Kendall Thomas, Cornel West, Patricia J. Williams

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679741453
• ISBN13: 9780679741459
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Issues just as important today as they were then.

Take one overwhelmingly male-centered and predominantly white society, add huge portions of power, racism, sexism, a misinformed public and gross displays of injustice, and you've got a recipe for the American way. This collection of essays written at the time of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings holds every bit of relevance now as it did nine years ago. Highlighting earlier civil rights legal battles and connecting their influence to the hearings themselves, each essayist examines in progressive detail just how pervasive--indeed, how dangerously latent--racism and sexism are in our society. How the volatile and often avoided issue of race can blind the equally volative and often dismissed issue of sexism in any race. In these essays, we are given a shockingly clear image of the circus that was the mishandling of the hearings. Explosive, revealling, and thought-provoking, this book yanks the proverbial rose-colored glasses from our collective American conscience and dares us to think for ourselves.