Table of Contents

Introduction: Friday on the Potomac  vii
Toni Morrison

An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague  3
A. Leon Higginbotham. Jr.

The Private Parts of Justice  40
Andrew Ross

Clarence Thomas and the Crisis of Black Political Culture  61
Manning Marable

False, Fleeting, Perjured Clarence: Yale's Brightest and Blackest Go to Washington  86
Michael Thelwell

Doing Things with Words: "Racism" as Speech Act and the Undoing of Justice  127
Claudia Brodsky Lacour

A Rare Case Study of Muleheadedness and Men  159
Patricia J. Williams

A Sentimental Journey: James Baldwin and the Thomas-Hill Hearings  172
Gayle Pemberton

Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype  200
Nell Irvin Painter

Double Standard, Double Blind: African-American Leadership After the Thomas Debacle  215
Carol M. Swain

A Good Judge of Character: Men, Metaphors, and the Common Culture  232
Homi K. Bhabha

White Feminisms and Black Realities: The Politics of Authenticity  251
Christine Stansell

Remembering Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas: What Really Happened When One Black Woman Spoke Out  269
Nellie Y. McKay

The Supreme Court Appointment Process and the Politics of Race and Sex  290
Margaret A. Burnham

Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means  323
Wahneema Lubiano

Strange Fruit  364
Kendall Thomas

Black Leadership and the Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning  390
Cornel West

Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriation of Anita Hill  402
Kimberlé Crenshaw

The Last Taboo  441
Paula Giddings

About the Contributors  471

About the Author

TONI MORRISON is the author of ten novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to A Mercy (2008). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.

With contributions by:
Homi K. Bhabha, Margaret A. Burnham, Kimberlé 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

Reviews

As Morrison (Jazz) writes in her pointed opening essay, the Thomas controversy last year both raised and buried issues of profound national significance. This collection . . . powerfully advances the debate . . . cordially but relentlessly lays out the legal history of the civil rights movement . . . describes the crisis in the response by black organizations, skillfully skewers the neoaccommodationist support of Thomas among black liberals . . . exemplifies James Baldwin's observation that white Americans don't know how to deal with a black who falls outside of their expectations. . . shows an example of how even militant feminists can be snookered when the issue is racial identity.
—Publisher's Weekly