Speaking Truth to Power (41 page)

One discussion does not a revolution or revelation make. The powerful charges of bringing down good men and bringing shame to the community go a long way to silence those who speak out. African American women are thus forced into a position of choosing between race and gender. When forced, we are likely to identify with race. Consequently, except for individual efforts the problems get little attention and no community discussion. Once we give up for political reasons the right to claim gender bias, the male perspective, whether right or wrong, becomes the black community perspective.

Consequently, all claims of bias and oppression lose some of their validity inside and outside the community. By raising questions of racism, Thomas and his supporters capitalized on this reality, counting on the community supporting a black man over a black woman. Thomas himself had counted on it when he used the “welfare queen” image of his sister to gain political points with the conservatives back in 1981. Ten years later the Republican senators and even David Brock could count
on the community identifying with Thomas, notwithstanding their own use of racially laden stereotypes of black women, to support their charges of racism.

I could not ignore these messages and the polls. I felt their sting. I read behind their open insult every plausible negative insinuation. Yet I longed for the community that was mine before partisanship and the politics of race and gender took it away from me. The author Zora Neale Hurston describes a scene in her novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God
in which a young black woman tried in a court of law is tried in the community court as well. In a poignant passage that reminded me all too much of my own situation, Hurston wrote in 1935:

On October 10, 1991, as I prepared for my testimony, I spoke to my lawyers about my fear of this very rejection. “Whatever happens,” I told them, “I do not want to destroy my ties with the community.” I warned that the claim might be used to divide the community. Nevertheless, when I needed it most, it was not there. Nothing could have prepared me for the pain of what the rejection meant. Yet I could not bring myself to abandon it. In Hurston’s book, Janie is eventually reunited with her community. I could only hope for the same.

D
espite the cynicism displayed during the hearing, eventually the disclosures led to an increase in formal complaints against harassers. Complaints filed with the EEOC increased by over 50 percent in the year following the hearing. In 1992 women and men filed a record-breaking number of complaints with the federal agency, some 7,407 total. Women proved the pundits wrong and understood the difference between how women felt and acted and how they are perceived. An explosion of challenges in the workplace led employers to take action. Whether they were motivated by desire to end the behavior or the fear of liability is not certain. What is certain is that workingwomen welcomed the chance to change intolerable circumstances in the workplace and to confront employers who were previously insensitive to the problem. Rather than recoil, women and many men galvanized around the issue.

This galvanization on the issue of sexual harassment led to the collective disgust the country felt when we learned of the so-called Tailhook incident. The initial incident centered around the sexual assault and molestation of over two dozen women at the Las Vegas Hilton during an annual meeting of an association of navy pilots. The subsequent cover-up told as much about the seriousness with which some viewed sexual misconduct as the incident itself.

Despite the navy’s zero-tolerance antiharassment policy, and despite
the numerous payments of lip service to sensitivity to the behavior following the Thomas hearing, Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, one of the first women to complain, met entrenched resistance to her charges. Instead of investigating the complaint to determine what had happened and who had participated, top officials participated in a blatant cover-up of the matter. As it turned out, this was not the first year that behavior of this nature occurred at the annual convention of the Tailhook Association. It was simply the first time that women banded together and complained. Just prior to the incident the rhetoric led to hope that if everyone understood what sexual harassment was, it could be stopped. If the military responded this way in the face of what constituted criminal molestation, what hope was there for swift effective reaction to harassment in the private workplace? The message from the navy was a discouraging one, another hurdle to overcome.

Even before I met Paula Coughlin in 1992 at the Glamour Magazine Awards Program, my heart went out to her. As the first woman to file a formal complaint over the Tailhook assaults, she was sure to experience concerted efforts to smear and disgrace her. Though she escaped the public humiliation of having the smear conducted in front of millions of television viewers, her experience may have been worse because her detractors could act without fear of public scrutiny. Since she was still in the navy, her torment was apt to be daily and routine. Later, men who once had been friends and colleagues, who were part of the cover-up following her complaint, were likely to respond to the exposure by further harassment. I knew that she was going to be blamed. I knew that as a result she would be targeted even by those who did not participate in the original act or the cover-up. I knew that this would continue as long as she remained in the military.

When I met Ms. Coughlin, I was impressed with her energy and with the indignation she expressed over the matter. All of her life, she had wanted to fly planes. Everything about her energy and personality suggests that she is the kind of person who could take on the challenge of breaking into the male-dominated field in a male-dominated institution. She is bright, spirited, clearheaded, and motivated. A woman who willingly
took a risk by entering a military which gave her little promise to fulfill that dream. She is like every daughter who is told that the opportunities to achieve are there for her in far greater numbers than for her mother’s generation. Her history suggests that she was willing to work twice as hard and prove herself over and again to be considered as equal to her male counterparts. I have no doubt that it was her sense of principle, that she should be treated as an equal, which led her to report the Tailhook assault. Ironically, that sense of principle and the action derived from it led to a cruel shattering of her hope that she would ever be considered as an equal to even her assailants. Her experience reminded me that those who would judge her, the officers and pilots in the navy, saw and acted toward her in terms of her body parts—not in terms of her skills as a pilot. Afterward, protecting the status quo was more important than recognizing the humanity of the individuals who sought to serve the military.

When navy officials discovered the cover-up in the investigation of the Tailhook incident, some of those directly and indirectly responsible resigned under pressure. Yet the second investigation netted few convictions for the molestations. Admiral Frank Kelso, commander in chief of naval forces during the incident, was awarded a fourth star upon his retirement. Accountability and responsibility, lessons endemic to the military, were low, given the severity of the infractions. Kelso was rewarded for his career, his responsibility for the misconduct overlooked.

The official response to this incident compares unfavorably with the response of the Canadian government to a videotaped episode of racial harassment and hazing. Recruits to the Canadian Airborne Regiment were forced to eat urine-soaked bread and fecal matter as part of the initiation rite. One black recruit was forced to walk on all fours while wearing a leash. As if that were not degrading enough, his initiators smeared the message “I Love the KKK” on his back with feces. The same division was accused of racist acts while acting on behalf of Canada as part of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in Somalia. The hazing behavior was the ultimate expression of obedience. The racist element of the division’s activities reflected and reinforced to an unacceptable
extreme the hierarchical ordering basic to the military system. In the same way, sexist behavior and sexual abuse represent an extreme way of promoting a hierarchy.

Over protests from various sources, Canadian Defence Minister David Collennette announced approximately one week after news media aired the videotape that the regiment would be disbanded. No videotape of the Tailhook wrongdoing exists. All that existed was the word of nearly eighty women and formal complaints from over two dozen coupled with clear evidence that those present wanted to avoid a proper investigation. But more important, the difference between the two episodes is that the Canadian episode involved leadership with a will for accountability. None was evident in the Tailhook episode. No official entertained abolishing the Tailhook Association or official recognition of it. Clearly, that is what it will take for the message of zero tolerance to be taken seriously.

Paula Coughlin sued the Tailhook Association and settled out of court. She also sued the Las Vegas Hilton for failure to provide adequate security. Evidence showed that hotel personnel had warned female hotel security guards to stay away from the Tailhook parties for their own safety, and were thus aware of the activity that the Tailhook conventioneers engaged in. In her suit against the Hilton, Coughlin testified that the harassment from navy personnel after she complained was relentless, so extreme that she considered suicide as the only way to end her misery. Her colleagues, who resented her role in the investigation and the attention brought upon the navy, treated her with contempt and shunned her, the ultimate renunciation in a climate that preaches camaraderie. Her tormentors, no doubt, thought their actions a proper response to her “treachery” in complaining. Before giving her a poor performance evaluation one of her supervisors said that her complaint had injured
his
career. One commander recommended that she return a bonus which she had received prior to the convention when her evaluations were outstanding.

In the end, Paula Coughlin left the navy, stating that the “covert attacks” on her by her colleagues left her no other choice. With little hope of advancing in the military, she left the navy at a time when the
demand for commercial pilots was low. Thus, her skills as a pilot have limited utility in the civilian marketplace. In arguing against the stiff punitive damage award, one hotel representative suggested that the hotel had suffered enough in loss of business surrounding the scandal. A jury, obviously moved by the extent of Coughlin’s suffering, awarded her $1.7 million in compensatory damages and assessed $5 million in damages against the hotel. The Hilton has appealed the award. The Nevada legislature quickly went to work to undo the damage award, passing a bill in one house to elevate the standard for corporate liability for failure to protect hotel guests from sexual assaults and making it retroactive to cases on appeal. Not surprisingly, the hotel lobby in the state of Nevada, home to resorts in Lake Tahoe, Reno, and Las Vegas, strongly supports the measure.

When I think of Paula Coughlin, I am frightened for her and for many other women in military and civilian service who have attempted to pursue careers and press their claims of harassment or other forms of sexual abuse. Two dozen women formally complained of being raped or sexually assaulted by fellow military personnel during the Gulf War. Such cases seem always to precede a cover-up or mismanaged investigation and result in termination of the complainant’s career. What is equally devastating is that the sexual harassment not only spoils careers but shatters dreams. Women in the 1980s were told that sexism was dead—that it was safe to have dreams and best to dream big. Unredressed sexual harassment not only takes away our dignity but spoils our belief in ourselves and in the fairness of life and conveys the message that our dreams are pointless.

As had been the case with Paula Coughlin, I relived my own experience when I learned of Suzanne J. Doucette. Doucette, an FBI agent who complained about being harassed by her supervisor, represents one more story of unofficial abuse leading to official mistreatment recorded since the hearing of October 1991. A ten-year veteran of the bureau, she broke unwritten agency rules and told her story of sexual harassment. In one incident her supervisor caught her in a choke hold from behind and demanded sexual favors. She managed to break free, but afterward the same supervisor began to devalue her contribution to the agency.

Prior to the incident, Doucette received commendations and bonuses for her performance as an agent, but afterward she was told that her evaluations would improve if she learned to get along with her male colleagues better. She filed a complaint which met with classic institutional denial. Her evaluations fell to “below acceptable.” Once considered a bright, up-and-coming member of the force, she was ostracized.

Doucette’s testimony about the harassment before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs resulted in her being placed on administrative leave without pay. She later left the force and pursued her complaint in court. She, too, abandoned her dream of service and she had to sell her home to finance her lawsuit. Yet she continued to pursue the claim not simply for her sake but for her two daughters, who adore and support her. She wants to be an example for them—to make the world better for them.

Winning a suit against the FBI may be as difficult as filing a complaint with the navy. The FBI is considered worldwide to be one of the premiere law enforcement agencies. It was venerated in a television series which ran during the 1960s and 1970s. Until the death of J. Edgar Hoover, its long-reigning chief, in 1972, the bureau refused to hire women as agents. As such, the FBI represents the classic paradigm of an institution where sexual harassment is likely to occur—a hierarchical organization which is historically male-dominated. Doucette’s was not the only complaint about harassment. She was one of the few to go public with her complaint. Afterward, she said, other women started telling about their experiences in the agency. Yet it took on the average over a year for the agency to investigate and process complaints about the behavior.