Robin Morgan in Conversation With Anita Hill

Anita Hill, a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of Brandeis’ Heller School for Social Policy and Management, became a national figure in 1991 when she testified at the Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Hill said that Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After much debate, the Senate confirmed Thomas to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52 to 48. But Hill’s testimony increased the public’s awareness of sexual harassment. In addition, the manner in which the all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Hill during her testimony inspired the record number of women who ran for office and who were elected to Congress in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman. Hill became a highly sought-after lecturer speaking on racial and gender issues in the workplace. She has appeared on national television programs, has published articles on civil rights issues in Newsweek and The New York Times, and has authored two books, Speaking Truth to Power and Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home. She also served as the co-editor of Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill/Thomas Hearings. In 2017, the #MeToo movement brought new media attention to Hill, and the newly formed Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace selected her to lead its efforts against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry.

Anita Hill has been a frequent guest on Women’s Media Center Live With Robin Morgan, most recently on the episode that aired June 26. Following is an edited and condensed excerpt from that interview, which is available by podcast at wmclive.com, iTunes, and other platforms. In it, Hill offers her urgently needed perspectives on current political and cultural crises, the importance of rebuilding trust in our institutions, why we need to protect queer youth, and where she finds hope.

Robin Morgan: Anita, welcome back to Women’s Media Center Live.

Anita Hill: It is wonderful to be in conversation with you, always.

RM: I want to start by asking you, given how polarized the country is, and given — oh my god — the court, and Roe, and guns, and the international scene, it’s hard not to get depressed, although we can’t afford to get depressed: What are your thoughts on any or all of that?

AH: The polarization is something that we hear about so often in the press. We talk about the great divisions that are in the country now, and we see the two emblems of the divisions as only political. One of the things, though, that really troubles me is that while we’re focusing on the politics, what is happening is that the battles are being fought, and often lost, at the expense of the most vulnerable. And what I mean by that is that we see that we are likely going to have a restriction on the basic rights that we thought were already well earned and precedent, and whether it’s reproductive rights, or basic rights of equality, whether we’re talking about race or gender, or gender identity or sexuality, those are what seem to be up for grabs right now. And while we’re focused on the politics, the Democrats vs. the Republicans in this country, those rights are being eroded. And we have got to refocus our attention to really understand that this is where we are right now, and that there needs to be a public outcry because the losses will last us for decades, and really generations. It will affect our children and our children’s children unless we respond right now to that crisis. People want to say, well, you know, “The sky’s falling, you’re just exaggerating …”

RM: No, I don’t think so.

AH: Look at the rise of hate crimes — that’s the first indication of where we are, because the hate crimes really are about people pushing back on rights of marginalized communities, individuals, and this is not a place that we want to be in, and it’s not a world that we want to leave our children.

RM: Well, look at the hysteria (and I do use the word advisedly) over critical race theory, over books in the schools; they’re beginning to burn books, you know. So that that level of polarization — if I say the word systemicone more time, I think I will go mad. That gets completely lost in this rush to politicize everything, as if there were nothing beyond politics, nothing deeper, nothing more pervasive, nothing systemic, to be either affirmed or confronted. And it’s enough to make you completely crazy. How do you not go crazy?

AH: Well, I don’t go crazy because I understand what’s going on, and we need our sanity. But one of the things that we have to start doing when we look at critical race theory and the attack on critical theory, when we look on queer theory, and we look on what is happening with the books that reference sexuality, we have to call it what it is: It is another form of violence, and we have not been very clear about that.

RM: That’s interesting; say more.

AH: Well, what I’m saying is when you completely disaffirm someone’s identity, it is an emotional violence that is being displayed against them. It creates the kind of harm [against] people who suffer because of their sexual identity, gay and queer children who are ostracized in their communities. There are lawsuits that are trying to correct this problem, but they do not go far enough, and there are just not enough courts in the world to get their arms around this issue. But what we tend to think of as violence is physical violence, and that does exist, but there’s an emotional violence that we are neglecting, and it is one of the reasons that we have such high rates of suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts among young children who are what we call sexual minorities, who identify as either nonbinary or queer or gay. We have a crisis there that is not caused by anything other than the social violence that they have experienced trying to be who they are. And I think we have a level of that in society, we have this tendency — and I write about it in my book — of negating the harm, and we are seeing this during this time of polarization where people feel free to say obscene, destructive things, and we’re seeing it escalated, and we need to be able to step up and identify it for what it is, and the harm that it’s causing.

RM: Well, you saw some of the harm in the [January 6] hearings, which are giving me some heartening feeling, but the testimony of two ordinary citizens, two women — Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss — the electoral workers, and the violence, yes, that was done to these lives. You know, ordinary people, doing their job, doing it well, had been doing it for years, no problems whatsoever, and were continuing to do it with excellence — and their lives were all but destroyed. And when [Moss] at one point was listing all the things that had been done to her life, from the loss of reputation, to you name it, and she also added in, “and I gained 60 pounds,” I thought, Every woman is relating to that. I certainly am, as a form of invasive violence to her life; that’s a different kind of violence.

AH: It is. It is. And we only recognize the broken bones and the killings as violence, and that is where we’re off track, and that is where I think we need to think differently as a public about it. There is the cultural problem, that we as a culture only see violence in terms of its physical form. And even then we can excuse it. We use a whole bunch of explanations for it that don’t really fit, but in the case of Ms. Moss, we had a systemic problem. And I saw it played out in the hearings because we had the protections for elected officials: They have security, they have state security, they have body guards. The everyday workers do not have that; what they had was the FBI coming to their homes and saying, You’re not safe here. No one was reaching out to provide them safety and security. So that’s the systemic failure …

RM: Meanwhile, the [former] president of the United States was traducing them, was slandering them, was saying that they were hacks, that they were scam artists …

AH: And behind that was, again, the cultural problem: Those were words that were pitted against two black women.

RM: Coded, yeah, coded.

AH: Coded for race, coded for gender, and speaking to a base that was open to hearing that without any criticism at all, and without any knowledge, which gets us back to critical race theory and what we’re teaching in our schools, which is why it’s so important.

RM: This is one of the reasons Women’s Media Center exists — to try and say, “Whoa, wait a minute, what about …" and then whatever, fill in the blank, because it doesn’t get said, the question doesn’t get followed up, it doesn’t get nailed, particularly on sex and on race, and on a lot of other things as well. But those are the deep, systemic wounds that continue to fester.

AH: Well, it’s culture built into our system. Because we know that those election workers are not going to be high-paid people who can find their own safety. So the system just accepts that those people will be injured…

RM: And expendable.

AH: And, yes, they are expendable, and some have opted out of doing the work that needs to be done to protect our government and our electoral system.

RM: [Moss] said that.

AH: You asked me what I do to be hopeful. I am hopeful because there is a resistance, and an effort to educate people, and to let people know exactly where these behaviors and offenses are coming from. There is an effort to provide information and educate people about how we should be looking at these problems, not in isolation, but really as part of our culture and part of our system. And it’s ongoing, and I think we’re raising a generation of young people who are smarter about these issues than my generation was, certainly than my generation was at the age that they are now. And that is encouraging to me.

RM: Well, it’s also encouraging that they’re working across the aisle as it were, and I don’t mean Republican/Democrat, but I mean there was a time, and I go back to the Civil Rights Movement, there was a time when there was competition between oppressed peoples — you know, the “Oppression Olympics,” and who had it worse, and there was fighting over funding, and that is much less now. There’s a real turning out for all causes, and a working together, and intersectionality, understood as the Venn diagram over which many, many, many things overlap, so I find that encouraging.

AH: You’re so right about that, and part of that is political, because policy needs to be looked at. It’s not just about changing culture; we need to change policy. That coming together across populations occurred very early on in the Trump administration, where organizations that, as you’ve said, may have in the past competed for funds, or competed for notoriety or which was the most important to be addressed, have come together and made a pledge that they would not be divided by the policies that were proposed during the Trump administration. And so I think that it’s not only that people are working together, there’s an organized system for working together on these issues. Whether it’s raising public awareness or changing public policy, the work is going on.

RM: You’re absolutely right, and that’s the only thing that keeps me going, because I remind myself every day, that [to quote] Fanny Lou Hamer, you gotta keep on keeping on. But it’s difficult when the institutions themselves have been so corrupted. And institutions don’t defend themselves, people defend institutions, and when you don’t have people defending institutions … Like the Republican Party — up until the current hearings we didn’t hear from Trumpist Republicans. But now and a few of them have come forward and with great courage are testifying. I grant you that I have a very petty reaction sometimes in which I think, They’re just doing their job; there’s no reason to fall on the floor in a worshipful position, because they’re just doing the damn job. And that would be true even of Liz Cheney, but the truth is they do deserve some praise, it did cost them, and I’m grateful for it. But we need more, we need just much, much, much more.

AH: You talk about the institutions, and let’s look at the federal courts, the Supreme Court. We know that there is a huge problem within our federal judicial system in terms of people having trust in the system, people having trust in the people who are serving on the court. They have mistrust in the process for getting people on, because that process has been corrupted. And it’s been corrupted in a number of ways — I don’t have to get into all of them — but here is one area where I’m hopeful that people will start to see how important the courts are, not only in this sort of high-level sense, but in their everyday lives, and how when other institutions fail, in this country, in our system, the courts take over, the courts continue to support and build up the foundations of our democratic systems. If that is not being experienced in the process for selecting the individuals who are on the court, then people don’t trust the courts themselves. And so I think that we need to do more talking about, “What are we going to do about the courts.” Yes, we need to have legislation passed, but what are we going to do to encourage people that if legislation is passed and there are challenges, that you have a body with integrity that is going to hear those challenges and adjudicate fairly.

RM: Because the feeling is not there at this point that that’s the case.

AH: It absolutely isn’t, and we need to be up in arms about that.

RM: What do you think, personally and as a law professor, about the idea of expanding the court so that its current, incredibly manipulated push to the right is a fairer balance, so there are more members on the court? Do you think that that’s crazy or impossible or doable or what?

AH: I think the goal is laudable — yes, of course we want a balance — but it seems to be a temporary quick fix because we know that if the legislative bodies change, and if the Senate changes and the president is a Republican, then the president might in fact end up changing the court again.

RM: So the court becomes a basketball.

AH: Yeah, it becomes a back and forth, all based on politics, so I’m not sure that the number is the significant part of what we should be concerned about. I’ve heard the arguments. I would love for there to be a possibility of greater balance on the court, but let’s assume that Joe Biden says, “OK, we’re now going to have 13 members on the court, today,” do we think that the system for putting people on the court is fair enough that he will be able to create a majority of people who are thinking progressively about the role of the law?

RM: Not with the current Senate, no.

AH: That’s my thinking about it. I don’t mean to discourage somebody that is better versed in this …

RM: Grasping at straws …

AH: Well, somebody else may be able to think this through differently and come up with a way to do it, but I think what it does come down to is we need to fix the system for how we got to this imbalance.

RM: Yeah, it’s just that that takes a long time — just as it took a long time to undo it, so it will take a long time to do it back up again, and I don’t know that we have the time. It’s a frightening time in this country, and every day … I mean as more people run for office saying straight out that they will not abide by election returns. Granted, the system, democracy that is, was always delicate, it was never a given, a done deal. It was always, as the Founders said, an experiment, a grand experiment, and so it takes constant nourishing, like a garden. But when you see institutions being chipped away like that, and the court is the place of last resort, it’s very scary, and it takes a long time to really right it from the ground up.

AH: The problem is not the time, the problem is the will: Do we have the will to confront it?

RM: Well, you do, and I do, so there’s two of us.

AH: It doesn’t take everybody, it just takes two!

RM: We can damn well start there. Oh, I love you so much, Anita Hill, and I thank you for being you, and I thank you for coming back and doing the program again. And I hope you write lots more books and plant your wonderful thoughts in lots more students, because we need you for a long time on this planet.

AH: Well, thank you, and I plan to be here for a long time … Stay well, and stay strong.