If you watched The People v. O.J. Simpson, there’s a good chance that you’re still reeling from Sarah Paulson’s incredible turn as Marcia Clark. One of my personal favorite moments for her character occurred early on in the season, as she prepared for jury selection. Clark was convinced that the more women she could get on the jury, the better the chances for a conviction. OJ Simpson was a known abuser of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Clark knew that women would side with a victim of domestic violence. As we all know, Clark had to learn the hard way that—at least in America—race issues and racial solidarity will often trump gender issues. The black women whom she expected to view OJ as a violent and dangerous man capable of murder, instead saw him as a black man who had married a gold digging white woman—and most importantly, they saw him as a victim of the racist LAPD. For better or worse, they chose to make a statement against racism, rather than one against domestic violence. But, as Sterling Brown’s Chris Darden says at the end of the season, Simpson’s acquittal meant nothing for black people, and everything for wealthy men in power—which is really what OJ had become (the series suggests that Simpsons’ class, rather than his race, better defined his position in America). Another way to look at it, is to say that the patriarchy won, once again.
Clark’s reaction to the race card being played so vehemently in the Simpson case came to mind as I watched Kerry Washington as Anita Hill, reacting to Clarence Thomas (played by Wendell Pierce) as he brought up race in his denial of her sexual harassment claim. In director Rick Famuyiwa’s Confirmation, there’s a powerful moment when the camera stays on Washington’s body, crouching down in a hallway, devastated by the blow of his rebuttal. Not only has he introduced race and racism into the conversation, but her own lawyer, Jeffrey Wright’s Charles Ogletree, is explaining to her that he has won many people over in doing so.
This has nothing to do with race. This is about sexual harassment, she declares (though Anita Hill was very aware that her position as a black woman with a political voice was, indeed, a race issue). Like Clark, she can’t make sense of the argument of racism in a case that is really about one man’s treatment and disregard for a woman (Thomas’ obviously being a different sort of attack than Simpson’s). But it doesn’t matter, because the gauntlet has been thrown. From the moment Thomas declared the senate hearings a “high-tech lynching,” he had essentially accused the white men in power of racism. And we all know how much white men in power hate to be accused of such things (even, or especially, when their policies and practices reek of the stench).
And while Hill was correct that race played no part in her accusation, it became clear that race was an issue in the case itself—as it [almost] always is. One character reminds her that the Senate Judiciary Committee—and the American public—would have had a very different reaction, had Hill been a white woman. And Thomas—despicable though he was (and is)—wasn’t wrong about the fact that his white counterparts were getting away with much worse. He knew that introducing/abusing the concept of “lynching” and racism in the political sphere was the perfect distraction from the real issue of sexism. Seeing Confirmation, especially after the finale of People vs. O.J. Simpson, it’s troubling to consider how much people would rather be accused of sexism or sexist behavior, than racism. Thomas was able to use the white men in power with this knowledge, and he was also able to find support from black women who (like the women on the Simpson jury) were likely to place racial solidarity above gender solidarity—even when the woman in question (really women, lest we forget about Angela Wright, played by Jennifer Hudson) is black.
