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What Clarence Thomas can teach Hollywood about the real fight for equality

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently argued that modern progressivism has abandoned the principles of equal natural rights in the Declaration of Independence in favor of a politics of state-managed grievance.

Hollywood proves his point: Grievance becomes victimhood, and victimhood becomes a substitute for power.

Since Harvey Weinstein became Hollywood’s sacrificial villain in 2017, the industry has largely treated women’s inequality as a story of harm — something to expose, manage, monetize, and symbolically repair.

But #MeToo’s central message — you’re a victim, and I’m a victim, too — has done little to advance the equality of women’s voices and perspectives in film and television production.

Hollywood has an unhealthy obsession with victimization. And it goes back to 1991, when Professor Anita Hill’s testimony against then-Judge Clarence Thomas made sexual harassment the dominant national framework for understanding women’s workplace inequality.

Awareness surged, including in Hollywood, and sexual harassment policies followed.

Women directors had briefly gained ground in the late 1980s and early 1990s, after six women directors, “The Original Six,” pushed for legal action through the Directors Guild of America, helping force the industry toward change. The percentage of female directors rose from 0.5% to 16% in ten years.

Then, in the wake of Anita Hill’s 1991 sexual-harassment testimony against Clarence Thomas, the numbers began to fall again, and stayed low for nearly two decades.

By 2012 and 2013, when I began bringing the issue of discrimination against women directors to the attention of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and........

© New York Post