Dear friend,
I added my name along with 1600 men in an ad for The New York Times in support of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, an homage to the ad 1600 Black women placed in the very same paper 27 years ago in support of Anita Hill. While our messages are usually about giving members like you something strategic to do like targeting decision makers with petition deliveries or phone calls and billboards, this moment feels different.
I added my name because the culture of sexual violence is so pervasive in America that we are, once again, witnessing a woman have to bear the burden of proof against a Supreme Court nominee. Dr. Blasey Ford had to prove to a hearing committee that Brett Kavanaugh held her down and sexually assaulted her decades ago in high school. Meanwhile Kavanaugh, the man who should be proving he is fit for such an appointment, could rely on the assumptions about race and gender so deeply held in this country as to be scarcely acknowledged.
Brett Kavanaugh gets the benefit of the doubt because he is a white man from society’s elite who is backed by the GOP and corporate enablers. Throughout the hearing, Kavanaugh was visibly angry and agitated that anyone had the audacity to question him. His confirmation should have been a forgone conclusion-- his predatory behavior barely worth rehashing.
Being born into wealth and cultured in prep schools means that the rules, both written and unwritten, that govern us all, do not apply to him and those like him. ‘Boys will be boys’ has been used during this hearing again and again not so much as a defense for Kavanaugh, but as an accepted societal rule that frees him from any form of responsibility. More than that, these unwritten rules allowed him to perform victimhood for being challenged at all.
Yet when I think about 12 year old Tamir Rice, 17 year old Trayvon Martin and 18 year old Mike Brown, three Black boys killed for being Black boys, it is clear that they were not one of the ‘boys’ in that unwritten rule. Nor were they allowed to be victims. America put them on trial for their own deaths. In this country’s imagination, Black people must have done something to deserve it and the onus is on us to prove otherwise.
That Black people must bear the burden of proof is not only widely understood, our very survival depends on it. This hideously loaded conclusion is something that Black children become aware of as soon as the world becomes aware of them. And while I am a steadfast supporter of Dr. Blasey Ford, I know in my bones that the burden of proof for Black people, and especially Black women, goes even deeper still.
Dr. Blasey Ford’s elite upbringing, diminished only by her gender in the eyes of America, led many to find her testimony against Kavanaugh to be ‘credible’. Yet those same rules made it so that Anita Hill, a Black woman and law professor who testified against Judge Clarence Thomas during his hearings in 1991 for sexual harassment, was not only found to be untrustworthy, she was attacked and vilified across the country. Anita Hill paved the way for a movement like #MeToo and the embrace of women like Dr. Ford across the political left, but was rejected in her time of need and action.
What we see in Kavanaugh and his corporate and GOP enablers is a continuation of history which has shown that the people who have constructed this country keep moving the goalpost to maintain an economic, social and political apartheid. These enablers are doing work to ensure that judges like Kavanaugh are always in the pipeline. Judges who don’t think that Brown v. Board was decided fairly, that think the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act marked the downfall of our country. Judges who believe that free speech only belongs to white men and that the sexual assault of a woman or girl should be considered a mere youthful frivolity.
This is why we must use this moment to not only examine how we show up for Ford, but why now more than ever we need decision makers willing to challenge both the written and unwritten rules that govern a society built on the backs of Black people, women and other marginalized groups. When we build our power against a system that is rigged against us, when we build a world where all women are believed and the rights of Black people are protected and respected, we can truly begin to overcome the racism and sexism that keep millions of people, and this country, from realizing both our potential and our rightful future.
Until justice is real,
Rashad Robinson
