After lunch, Kavanaugh took the table, alone and enraged. The Republican senators grew restless, eventually bypassing Mitchell to speak directly to their man. The dais became a pulpit to histrionically decry Kavanaugh’s unjust treatment. The only visible women were those Democratic senators to whom Kavanaugh condescended, the agonized family members and friends who sat behind him, a few dispassionate observers and, well, Alyssa Milano.
Twenty-seven years earlier, Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas sat at a table draped in kelly green, which added an inappropriate air of levity to the tense proceedings. Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh rested their nervously clasped hands and Coke cans on bare wooden tabletops, underneath which a black skirt concealed tangled wires and quaking knees. And while Hill confronted an all-male, all-white panel, Blasey Ford faced a more diverse group, including four women and three people of color – all Democrats. Yet several reporters noted that the Republican cohort was most directly in Blasey Ford’s line of sight. Their wooden faces matched the wooden walls and furnishings, all emanating the privilege and polish of elite institutions that have long prioritized white patriarchal interests.
Mitchell and her little desk strewn with loose-leaf paper were telegenic accents, mere ornaments to the entrenched political edifice. Yet white patriarchal power would not be undone by women seated at skirted tables or tiny desks. In 2018, as in 1991, the semiotics of the room foretold the hearing’s conclusion. There would be no splintering of a great man’s polished record, no obstructions to his inevitable ascent.
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