(TriceEdneyWire.com)—Congressman John Conyers was the first politician to leave his job after the “Me Too” hash tag galvanized women to speak up about sexual misconduct, harassment and more. Too bad that impetus did not float up to the top, when an avowed grabber of women’s genitals was elected to lead this country. Too bad, too, that the many members of Congress who have paid accusers out of a taxpayer-funded slush fund have not been unmasked. We know some of the names.
Texas Congressman Blake Farenthold (R) arranged to have his former communications director paid $84,000 (a fraction of the $27,000 Conyers is said to have paid). He has not resigned, nor have Congressional Republicans, including leader Paul Ryan, R-Wis., called for his resignation. He says he will pay the money back. Right.
As a woman I am cheered by the #MeToo movement, although I am also chagrined by the myopia about women of color and sexual harassment/rape/more. In 1944, Recy Taylor was viciously raped by seven White men who never paid a price. Our civil rights icon, Rosa Parks, was an NAACP investigator in this case, as chronicled by Danielle McGuire in her book, At The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance (Vintage, 2010). And the first case in which the Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was brought by an African American woman, Michelle Vinson, in the case Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986). The high profile White women who are talking about workplace sexual harassment and assault really need to acknowledge the many ways that African American women have been systematically abused, and systematically ignored (and sometimes conspired against) by their White “sisters.”
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