Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

Lalami opens this essay with a brief review of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh, whom she testified had sexually assaulted her years earlier. Lalami notes that the main criticism levied against Blasey Ford was that she did not come forward sooner. This discussion leads into Lalami’s memory of an early job for Channel One, where her supervisor regularly harassed female employees with unsolicited hugs and pet names. Lalami was fired from this job because she explicitly confronted this supervisor and rejected his advances. However, she had no real course of action to dispute her dismissal, and she notes that many women do not come forward with accusations because they, too, might lose their jobs.

During the proceedings, Republicans questioned the reliability of Blasey Ford’s testimony because of suggestions that another man had committed the crime. Though Blasey Ford maintained her story, she was rejected by those in power as an unreliable narrator. This dismissal mirrors men’s dismissals of women throughout literary history; Lalami points out examples of this in The Odyssey and the Qur’an. She notes that this history of not being believed is another reason why women are reluctant to come forward. Lalami recounts that when she was a child, her brother was afforded more freedom than she was, and her mother insisted on teaching her how to cook and clean in preparation for marriage.