Congratulations to Anna Madison Burns for winning the Sands Essay Award in the Scripps College Journal 2019 Writing & Art Contest! ~
As Anita Hill testified before the United States Senate on October 11, 1991, she understood that she had to tread a fine line. It was not yet common for women to come out against male harassment – particularly if the man was powerful, and particularly if the woman was Black. Professor Hill broke a precedent of silence in order to add her experiences into the overall image painted of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Senate Committee voting to allow him onto the Supreme Court of the United States, a position held for life. As Hill attempted to convince the Senators of the truthfulness of her experiences with Thomas, a prominent rhetorical strategy she utilized throughout was that of the role of passive sentence structures. This strategic structuring of her sentences served to emphasize that Thomas’ sexual harassment systematically removed Hill’s agency and allowed her to reiterate that the harassment served to buoy the power of the perpetrator while simultaneously degrading the role of the victim. In exercising her choice of which aspects of the harassment to focus on, however, Hill was able to reclaim her own agency before Congress and retain her power, even as she emphasized her victimhood.
Hill ostensibly crafts a distinction between the parts of her life over which she has ownership and those that she feels she has no control over through her use of strategic sentence structure. Notably, as she describes her upbringing in Oklahoma and her subsequent education, the entirety of the passage is in active voice – and ‘I’ (Hill herself) is clearly the principle focus, beginning the majority of her sentences. An example of this is when she discusses her tertiary education, stating, “I graduated from the university with academic honors and proceeded to Yale Law School, where I received my JD degree … I became a practicing lawyer” (Hill). Every primary clause within the quoted section begins with “I” as she describes her path in education, a rhetorical strategy that emphasizes the power she held within her life at the time. By reiterating her own role, Hill makes it clear that she was the one with agency during her entire childhood and education. This in and of itself is not extraordinary; what makes it notable is the way those power structures change once Clarence Thomas is introduced into her narrative. Here, it is useful to reiterate the difference between passive voice and passive structure. In passive voice, the direct object comes first in the clause and the agent, the subject doing the action, is at the end of the clause, relegated to a seemingly passive role; in passive structure, the speaker could still be the actor, but their role is relegated to the background within the sentence. The first occurrence of passive voice is when she first meets Thomas, in the first sentence that follows: “In 1981, I was introduced to now Judge Thomas by a mutual friend. Judge Thomas told me that he was anticipating a political appointment, and he asked if I would be interested in working with him” (Hill). This shift is when her rhetorical strategy first becomes clear; although she discusses her introduction to him in passive voice (in which she and Thomas are both objects and the “mutual friend” is the agent), she still had agency at that point in her career. As soon as she personally interacts with Thomas, however, she establishes the power difference between them, as she immediately becomes the object of her own sentence and he takes over the imperative role. This is especially significant considering that Hill is telling her own narrative, and demonstrates how deeply Thomas’ harassment had infiltrated her life, that even in her own testimony she as an individual becomes secondary to his actions.
Even as Professor Hill took on a supporting role in her own life in her testimony before Congress, she contrasts this with moments in which she attempts to emphasize her own agency in order to appear credible to the Senate Committee before which she was testifying. Throughout her entire testimony, she must simultaneously attempt to appear credible while continuously denying that she played any role in the harassment. Hill struggles between her own victimhood and trying to make herself seem dignified and in control, a dynamic which is most obvious when she discusses her work – and how Thomas factored into it. This struggle is best exemplified when she states: “I had a good deal of responsibility and independence. I thought he respected my work and that he trusted my judgement. After approximately three months of working there, he asked me to go out socially with him” (Hill). Here, Hill emphasizes that her priority was her work, attempting to remove herself from the root of the harassment in the eyes of the Senate, and she emphasizes her own subjectivity with “I thought.” However, her next sentence gives her a passive role, causing the initial dependent clause in which she is the subject (“working”) to be cut off from the independent clause (Thomas “asked”). The result of this is that Thomas is given the power to determine the narrative. In certain prominent instances in her testimony, her language turns in this way from clauses dominated by actions that she herself undertook to clauses in which she is the one acted upon, such as when “he asked me [Hill] to go out socially with him.” She thus exemplifies her loss of agency at the hands of Clarence Thomas – even as she attempts to clarify her own power and dedication in her line of work.
Surprisingly, in instances where from an outside view she held extensive power (most prominently when she decided to testify against Thomas at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings), her language betrays her argument by undermining her own credibility as she effectively removes herself from her own sentences. As she discusses her decision to come forward, she asserts that “what happened next and telling the world about it are the two most difficult things – experiences of my life. It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration … that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters” (Hill). Even as Hill is the main feature of these sentences as the one who chose to testify, the sentence order is inverted to a passive structure in a way such that Hill herself still is relegated to a background role in her own story. Rather than saying ‘I am only able to talk about these matters after … ,’ Hill’s role in the sentence comes almost as an afterthought. As Hill reiterates for the first of two times (the latter being one of her closing statements) how difficult the experience of deciding to testify was for her, she had the double effect of both conveying that she would not have come forward without cause (thus attempting to confirm her reliability to the Senators by proving her earnestness) as well as underlying her own deep disturbance as a result of the matter, demonstrating that even in moments when she should have had extensive agency, Thomas had taken so much of her confidence that she was left with next to no power of her own.
Hill’s overall lack of power within her own narrative is particularly demonstrated when she discusses the consequences that the sexual harassment had on her life. As Hill begins to describe some of the results of Thomas’ actions, the pronoun ‘I’ is at the forefront of every sentence, and the sentences are in active voice. However, when one looks more closely at a particularly prominent sentence within the testimony, the removal of any sense of cause leaves room for doubt in Hill’s argument: “I began to feel severe stress on the job. I began to be concerned that Clarence Thomas might take out his anger with me by degrading me or not giving me important assignments. I also thought that he might find an excuse for dismissing me” (Hill). Here, Hill places more weight on her own feelings rather than Thomas’ actions; although Hill is demonstrating that the consequences of the harassment are a burden which she alone has to carry, underneath that her language allows Thomas to appear to have ownership over her reactions to his behavior. Even in the parts of her life which Hill is emphasizing her agency in order to force the Senate committee members to acknowledge the lasting impact sexual harassment has on survivors, her rhetorical choices foreground that she is continuously undermined by the subconscious power which Clarence Thomas exerted on her. This struggle between attempting to convince Senators of her reliability and the significance of her claims that she was psychologically weakened by Thomas’ past actions demonstrates that even in her moment of power – her testimony – Hill is unable to remove herself from the traumatic events which led to this moment. However, in the final words of her testimony she is able to reclaim some of that power, that agency which was so wrongfully taken from her when she states: “I felt that I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent” (Hill). Here, Hill reasserts her own power and is able to take control of her narrative, finding her desperately needed power in the act of coming forward against her abuser. These compelling final words, in which for one of the first times the efficacy of her narrative rests entirely on her, allow Hill to begin breaking through the veil of victimhood she placed on herself in order to appeal to Congress from the beginning of the testimony, giving her a final victory in a harrowing account of her professional experiences with Clarence Thomas.
Of course, we know now that the final power Hill found within her story did not sway the Senators listening to her testimony: Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, where he remains to this day. It is of course possible that Hill’s use of passive sentence structure was not a subconscious outlet for her internalized lack of agency, but a rhetorical choice, or even just a function of how sentences are structured when one has been through significant trauma. However, the moments in which Hill chooses to take or remove herself from the power in her words ultimately demonstrate that sexual harassment is more than just humiliating – it strips the victims of their own power, to an extremity that it is difficult to reclaim agency even a decade later. Her continual emphasis on her own reactions to the situation, whether the sentence be in active or passive voice, left room for the Congresspeople to doubt her, and crafted a passive structure throughout the entire narrative, and left room for Congress to doubt her. Hill, whether intentionally or not, makes a statement on behalf of those who have survived sexual harassment that reclaiming the narrative of their life is an ongoing struggle, and not one that can be easily won, but one that is necessary to fight in order to reclaim their power. In doing so, she began a wave of recognition of the hostility of the workplace towards women, and especially towards Black women, reminding millions of women that they, too, must not be silent.
Works Cited:
Hill, Anita. “Opening Statement: Sexual Harassment Hearings Concerning Judge Clarence Thomas.” Gifts of Speech. 11 October 1991. Web. 30 September 2018.