CNN anchor Chris Wallace informed writer Professor Anita Hill that then-Choose Clarence Thomas “played the race card, and he performed it laborious” at the confirmation hearing after he faced Hill’s accusations of sexual misconduct.
On an episode of Who’s Speaking to Chris Wallace this week, the host confronted Hill with archival video of the confirmation listening to that made her reluctantly famous, and requested for her take on Thomas’s notorious “excessive-tech lyching” remarks. Prof. Hill pulled no punches:
WALLACE: Proper. K. Well, Clarence Thomas responded, and I think it’s truthful to assert that he performed the race card, and he performed it onerous. Again, have a look.
[[CLIP]] It is a circus, so national shame. And from my standpoint, as a black American, so far as I’m involved, it’s a high tech lynching for uppity blacks who whatsoever deign to think for themselves.
WALLACE: However what struck along with that, what struck thousands and thousands of people that were riveted to the television, and I will’t overstate what a big cultural experience this was, used to be the way you had been handled by means of the 14 white males, Republicans and Democrats. Who have been the Senate Judiciary Committee. Let’s take a look at some of that.
[[CLIP]] You testified this morning according to Senator Biden that probably the most embarrassing query concerned this no longer too unhealthy. Ladies’s huge breasts. That’s a phrase we use at all times. All we’ve heard for 103 days is ready a most exceptional man. It seems to me it didn’t really intend to kill him. However you could have…are you a scorned girl, do you’ve gotten a martyr advanced?
WALLACE: While you watch Thomas, and you then watch these senators, what are your ideas?
HILL: Neatly there are two issues with Thomas, it used to be the concept he could play the race card because the sufferer towards a black girl who will, you recognize, came from the identical history whose domestic had been threatened with lynching. Real lynching, now not high tech lynching whatever that used to be supposed to mean, and that he may be successful. That in a way, he used to be trying to alienate me from black folks that type of take over weigh any more or less, you know, admire or any roughly sympathy that black individuals would have for me. And that’s actually troublesome as a result of we know now that there was a whole historical past of sexual violation of African American girls that didn’t get in, in the dialogue at all. That wasn’t a part of the dialogue. I don’t assume the Senate committee may have heard that. They understood what came about to black man, and the truth and brutality of lynching. But I don’t assume they had a clue in regards to the experiences of black women. And that, to me, says that the 14 men who were there must no longer have been major a dialogue. They will have to not they didn’t have any thought of what they had been even talking about.
The latest interviews from Wallace’s series Who’s Speaking to Chris Wallace feature Gloria Estefan, Professor and author Anita Hill, and journalist Malcolm Gladwell.
Who’s Speaking to Chris Wallace drops new episodes Fridays on HBO Max, with a highlights convey on CNN Sunday night time.
Watch the full alternate above by way of HBO Max and CNN.
The put up CNN’s Chris Wallace Tells Anita Hill That Clarence Thomas ‘Performed The Race Card And He Played It Hard’ At Confirmation Hearing first seemed on Mediaite.