Believing Anita Hill
9/24/21 - Dr. Anita Hill made history in 1991 when she testified to the Senate Judiciary committee about the sexual harassment perpetrated against her by Clarence Thomas. After the all-white, all-male committee led by then-Senator Joe Biden heard Dr. Hill's testimony, Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the US Supreme Court.
In the 30 years since, Anita Hill has spent her career as a law professor hearing from survivors of gender-based violence, ranging from harassment (which she expected) to assault. In her new book, Believing, she connects the dots between the systems that empower abuse and minimize vulnerable people, and the culture that keeps us as bystanders. From that history, she tackles the policy solutions we'll need to reform the system from the inside and the social courage we'll need to muster to transform it.
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CREDITS
Executive Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Mercedes Gonzales-Bazan
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
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TRANSCRIPT: BELIEVING ANITA HILL
[Ads]
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend
Ann: A podcast for long distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I’m Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I’m Ann Freidman.
Aminatou: Hey Ann Friedman. What's up this week?
Ann: Um, wow. Today's guest is, well, I was going to say an icon, but that almost feels too superficial for the debt that we collectively owe Dr. Anita Hill. If you're not familiar with that name, Anita Hill made history in 1991. When she testified before Congress about the sexual harassment that she experienced while she was an aid to Clarence Thomas, he had been her supervisor at the equal employment opportunity commission. Um, and at the time in 91 was a nominee to the Supreme court, you know, back when it was fairly novel that we nominate predators to the Supreme court, but I digress anyway, she came forward because she was like, you know, maybe the United States Senate and the American people want to know about the fact that this Supreme court nominee is abusive to his employees. And, um, even that act of wanting to come forward is exceptional, knowing what we know both then and now about how survivors are treated, um, and here's how it played out. So at the time now president Joe Biden was head of the Senate judiciary committee and he was one of a group of exclusively white men on that committee. And it's pretty clear in hindsight and from people who have looked at the record and the number of other potential witnesses who came forward, that Biden seriously, seriously mishandled the investigation into Anita Hill's accusations. Um, he didn't take public testimony from these other potential witnesses. And, um, honestly, if you, uh, want to watch on YouTube, um, there are excerpts of these hearings available and it is, um, harrowing, uh, the tone and treatment that she faced, um, when she was testifying and, you know, the image of her in this, um, turquoise suit, you know, a Black woman telling her truth in front of an all white, all male committee is just impossible to unsee once you've seen it.
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Ann: You know, I mean, I know I said this before, but like hard to imagine just how difficult this was in 1991, before there were any real public narratives for talking about one's experience with harassment and abuse. So, um, it's no wonder that after she testified, she was absolutely deluged by letters from survivors who saw themselves in her. And that response from other survivors has really shaped her life's work, which is using the power of the law and of her own position of public prominence to end gender-based violence. Um, a little coda to the story about Biden in 2017, he said in an interview that he regretted how he treated her, but it wasn't until 2019 when he was pretty much fully in presidential campaign mode that he actually reached out to her directly. And after their conversation, his campaign released a statement that quote, he shared with her directly his regret for what she endured, which honestly makes my blood boil like his regret for what she endured like that is not an apology or, um, an acceptance of accountability. So that's just where that's just where I'm at. We talked about this when he was the sort of de facto nominee and we'll link in the show notes to our previous episodes about Biden and this issue. But anyway, back to Anita Hill, she is not dwelling on the quality of Biden's apology. Um, these days she is a professor of social policy law and women's gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. And she has a new book out, which is what we're talking to her about today. The book is Believing: Our Thirty-year Journey to End Gender Violence. And it's out on September 28th. We'll link it in the show notes. Here is Dr. Anita Hill.
[interview begins]
Ann: Professor Hill, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It's a real honor.
Professor Hill: Well, I am delighted to join you.
Ann: I really think that maybe your book should be on the history shelf. I'm not sure where they're going to shelve it, but when I read it, I was like, oh, this needs to be like a history 101 type of book hat college students are reading.
Professor Hill: You know, I mean, I try to do history and contextualize everything that I do. And especially when we're talking about social problems and the problem as large as gender based violence, I do like to give history. Racism, colonialism, you know, Jim Crow, slavery, all of these historical factors combine to disadvantage people who are already disadvantaged socially, economically, and politically in this country. And so we've got to take care of our own racism and transphobia and homophobia in order to really make sure that all women, all people are covered when we start talking about eliminating the solutions for eliminating a problem.
Ann: How did you decide what to include and what to exclude? Because at a certain point, as you talk about all of these overlapping problems, you know, like sexism, racism, classism, it becomes like, it just becomes so broad and thorny. And I would love to know a little bit more about your process for deciding what belongs in this, um, history of trying to end gendered violence.
Professor Hill: You know, I think what you're describing is as what someone said to me, when I started working on issues of gender-based violence, is that, you know, isn't this kind of like boiling the ocean. And in fact it really is, uh, what I understand is that gender-based violence really is about a range of behaviors. It's not simply about sexual harassment, which, which is what I think people presume that I'll be talking about. And I will, but it's also about, it's about bullying. It's about harassment in schools. It's about rape. It's about intimate partner violence. And when I say it's like boiling the ocean, it is hard to get your brain around all of it. But I made a deliberate decision that that's what I was going to do because when I started hearing the stories of people coming forward, who are identifying with my experience, I understood that they felt a connection and that there was a real connection. You just have to connect those dots to see the whole of the problem, because in fact, you are not going to be able to solve any one of these problems until you are willing to address all of them.
Ann: I want to come back to that in a moment, but I first want to talk about, you know, what you mentioned briefly there, which is that you have really become a repository for people's stories. And early in the book, you describe a little bit about what those first few months following your 1991 testimony were like, I don't know. I would just like to hear you talk about what surprised you about that time maybe and the genesis of the work that eventually became this book.
Professor Hill: Well, I can start with a story and a, and this is in the book, but I remember very early on, there was a letter from a woman who described herself as a school teacher. So ordinarily I was very interested in what she had to say as a teacher, myself. I, and she said to me in her letter that there will be waves of women behind you. And frankly, I didn't know exactly what that meant. I didn't even have a clue as to what was to come in the wake of that hearing, whether people would not step up, not come forward, uh, be intimidated, or whether she was right, that there would be waves. And she, it turns out that this, this teacher from Oregon was absolutely right. And the pundits, many of them who said, women will never step up now, we're wrong. What I did anticipate hearing from women who had problems, uh, in the workplace, sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, what I didn't anticipate hearing was stories of incest, rape, and sexual assault and all kinds of locations, intimate partner violence stories, stories of sexual extortion, and psychological abuse within relationships. And really, I didn't expect to hear from men not only, you know, in 1991 and the years, you know, soon after, but for the past 30 years, I also, when I heard those stories, I'm not sure that I expected that they would sound so similar in terms of the way that friends, family, and the general public react. And so it occurred to me that at the heart of the problem of, in all of these different behaviors, there's a core that we need to start to think of them together. Not as simple one-off problems, not his personal issues as so many people would like to say, but really by looking at the whole and looking at this collective human cost, we would begin to understand the urgency of eliminating gender based violence. When we started to see how many people were affected, how corrosive the problem is, how many families are affected and communities, and really ultimately how our national economy is affected, we would then see how ending it will benefit everyone.
Ann: You know, one thing that you write about in the book is how important it is to recognize that gender violence is not some distant or abstract thing, it's happening in real time to specific people we know and love. And it strikes me that, you know, the flip side of that is at least for me, personally, harder to accept, which is that it is perpetrated by people I know and potentially like care for or am invested in. And I think that that poses a really different kind of accountability question. And I think in a way, um, I don't know, I'm, I'm trying to talk my way to a question here. That's about the vastness of the ocean, but also about these specific painful points and opportunities that we have to act with. Maybe not all the information or resources we would want. And I'm curious about, you know, for you not so much when it comes to supporting a specific person, you know, who's been on the receiving or experiencing end of violence, but what have you done in cases where, you know, or suspect that you are connected with someone who is a perpetrator, you know, how do you, how do you move forward in that, in that situation?
Professor Hill: Yeah. I am concerned about accountability for individual perpetrators, but in believing what I challenge, uh, society, as well as our leaders to do is to look at how systems are locking the problem in place. How, you know, we can talk about whether Harvey Weinstein should go to jail. But what I really want to talk about is how did our systems fail us? When we realize that for years, he was not held accountable for behaviors that had been reported decades before. And how did, how did the system work to protect him from accountability? Because I think that's how we're going to get at such a big problem. We can keep talking about individual cases, but behind every one of those individual cases is a system that is not working to protect people from the problem.
Ann: That's a real catch 22 of activism. I think about where, you know, we on this show, we talk a lot about how these problems are systemic, but the truth is that means we are all also part of these systems. And, you know, um, for, to take one example, you know, lately there's been a lot of criticism of the Time's Up movement coming from survivors who say that the organization is now more invested in cozying up to powerful people, rather than holding them accountable for their role in this system that you described. And, um, I wonder if you have thoughts on that, um, you know, holding other activists accountable.
Professor Hill: The bottom line is that we all have to take responsibility. You know, I ask people, you know, how many times have you growing up heard somebody respond that their, tell them that their situation is not so bad. When someone talks about a problem about, of gender based violence, the response is to minimize it or dismiss it or deny it. We do that as a culture. And what we are not understanding is that we are grooming people to accept bad behavior. We're grooming people who are potential victims, who are vulnerable to dismiss their own pain. And we're grouping the people who might be abusers to accept that bad behavior is just what they do. But then there's that third group of observers who are also being groomed to accept we're part of the problem, because it has been built into the way we think about the problem of violence against women and girls in particular, all of our lives. But I do break down the problem, um, in terms of some solutions that I think people can see more readily, but before we get to those. I want to talk about those solutions, but I need to kind of fill in one more spot. First of all, we forget that there are costs to this behavior. And in fact, we don't even begin to measure what those costs are. Senators Warren and Gillibrand and Murphy and Feinstein to a government office asking for a calculation of the cost of sexual harassment to the economy. And you would think that, you know, our government collects a lot of data. You would think that they would have this in their collection at their ready. And the answer that the senators got back was, well, there is no place that we could find the data to support this. Now, why don't we have that information because we haven't taken the problem seriously enough to measure it. And if you don't measure something, you can't solve it and you do measure what you care about.
Ann: And I appreciate, I really appreciate that as, um, something to have as a blinking light in front of us, as we start to talk about solutions.
Professor Hill: Right. You know, the, the blinking light is also for me that we need leadership that is committed to ending gender based violence, leadership that actually believe that women are worth this effort and leadership that is willing to stay, that this problem rises to a public crisis problem.Can you think of any other problem in society that touches on all of our institutions, public and private. Our schools, our workplaces, and schools by schools, I mean, from elementary to college, our workplaces are, our courts are, uh, house and Senate are military. Every one of those institutions has been implicated in scandals around gender based violence of some form and, and really of every form that screams out to me that we have a public crisis.
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Ann: You mentioned leadership. And I really, you know, we devoted a couple of episodes, uh, to this podcast, um, to President Biden's record on these issues, you know, his treatment of you, but also the violence against women act and some other, you know, you really just looking at his whole record and I raise it because, you know, you said we can't do this without leadership. And I'm wondering what your views are, um, of his leadership on these issues, you know, in the past and today.
Professor Hill: Well, I do understand that he has put in the white house and office for addressing gender equity in this country. And that is a great start, but I think he can do more. I believe given the fact that all of our institutions are implicated. There needs to be a white house effort that demands that policies be adopted to address the issue of gender violence. That's just one of my suggestions, but if I wanted to just start talking about solutions, you know, I would start with let's measure let's measure and investigate, and it has to also take place. And in our private institutions, organizations, corporations need to be able to tell you as a public they're publicly held corporations in particular, what the level of abuse in their, in their organizations actually is. So measuring is one thing. Secondly, I think we need to provide, and this is a basic thing, that all of our systems, all of our institutions should have clear reporting options. And that's not been the case. I mean, it sounds like, oh, that's easy, but it has not been the case. Many, many, um, organizations have no reporting options, many have, uh, reporting options that are obtuse and no one can figure out what they are. And they especially do not reach low income workers. The further you are away from the top of an organizational chart, the less likely you are to even know that these options exist and how to navigate them. We need, as I was saying, the government to look at all of our, through all of our agencies and to deliberately address what they need to do to help people who are victimized by gender-based violence, whether it is providing paths to economic security, whether or to providing housing or just our educational opportunities. And I think that's where, you know, leadership, political leadership really needs to get together and stop making this a partisan issue. We need judges that understand that the civil rights laws were meant to do a way with cultural excuses for abuse. The goal of the civil rights laws was not to protect corporations from accountability. It was to make sure corporations are accountable. And I guess finally, we need to restore government's role in protections through the Violence Against Women act. You mentioned Joe Biden and the Violence Against Women's act. And he was instrumental in its passage. Um, there were women in the house, Patricia Schroeder for one who was, you know, the engineer. She and Patsy Mink and Eleanor Holmes, Norton, all of whom had backgrounds dealing with issues of violence and gender discrimination were truly orchestrating the data needed to support the violence against women's act. The violence against women's act was gutted in 2000. Now is the time with the information we have. We need to make sure that Congress takes that role seriously. And that begins to build back into the law, strengthening the law and providing protection for victims and survivors.
Ann: I want to ask you a question about more recent history. I was reading some interviews you gave in 2018 and 2019. When you spoke about how the moment of widespread attention to me, two stories presented this huge opportunity. And with a few years hindsight, I'm wondering if you think we've collectively made the most of that opportunity.
Professor Hill: That's yet to be determined. And the short answer to that is until the system has changed, we haven't made the most of it. We have been affirmed in our position that this is a huge problem, that it needs more attention, that it is so bad that it's not normal or natural, just because it's so prevalent. So we've made that very clear, I think, uh, in those 19 million hashtag posts under Me Too, we've made that very clear, but we still haven't seen the structural changes that will build into place, what we have learned about how to make things change.
Ann: And I also want to ask about this period we live in right now, when we have yet to see this kind of systemic structural change that, you know, we've, we've been talking about for the last half hour, because, you know, obviously there are people who are, um, living with the pain of experiencing this kind of violence in, in real time, you know, um, it's not like it's not like that can be deferred until the moment when the whole system is fixed. And, you know, you're someone who has a bit of experience with the pain and disappointment and difficulty of not seeing someone who's perpetrated violence against you brought to justice. And I'm wondering if you know, those folks are listening, what you would tell them about moving forward in this extremely flawed moment that we live in right now.
Professor Hill: I believe that we need to be doing both. We need to be fixing the systems and the structures and addressing the cultural change as well as providing resources, the lack of resources available specifically for intimate partner violence suffers. So we know that the numbers are there, and these are pre pandemic numbers, 10 million or so individuals will be victimized. But what we often don't think about is that 38% of those every year, 10 million, 38% will be left homeless. Our shelters were overloaded. All of our resources were overtaxed during the pandemic and you're right. Those individuals can't wait, and I'm not expecting that we should ask them to wait. We got to get out of our mind this cultural excuse that we use, oh, it's a personal problem or an individual problem on which lends itself to victim blaming. And therefore the public should not be absorbing any more costs to address that. You know, that's one of these we've got, we've, we've got to address, but getting those resources to where they can work and actually directly benefit people. It's absolutely an imperative.
Ann: So what are some of the difficult ways that these big systemic problems play out in a really personal immediate way?
Professor Hill: One of the questions that I get too frequently is that from it's from a young Black woman who wants to know how they can come forward and complain about gender-based violence, when the person that they're complaining about is a Black male. Um, they worry about their own safety, but they also worry about shaming the race and harming Black men generally. And there's this conflict that we, if you don't get rid of racism, if you don't attend to the problem of racism in that situation, you're not going to be able to help this young, these young women, uh, to protect them from gender based violence. I also hear from young Black men who say, you know, I really believe in what you're doing and I want to support you, but these young men say I'm afraid of being targeted and accused because I am a Black male I'm vulnerable because I'm a Black male. I know our history of false accusations. And so again, what we have is this history of racism that is locking into place, bad behavior that our young people are trying to get out of. I don't have the answer to all of those questions, but it, you know, it calls for systemic change, of course, but it also calls for caring and understanding about how gender based violence is experience depending on individuals, different identities. And so we have to do more to think about that. Then same can be said of other communities, oh, I I've heard from people who are gay, who are saying, you know, I can't raise a complaint because people already look at people in my community. You know, the gaze is on us. That critical gaze is on us because of our sexual identity. And so I, I have to be quiet in order that I don't perpetuate some stereotype about gay people being abusive and, and so we've got to, we've got to do more in deeper understanding too, to really get to the problems of everyone that's experiencing gender violence.
Ann: I'm curious about what you, what you say to those people in real time. Like, what do you say to a young Black woman who comes to you with that question?
Professor Hill: Well, we very often deal with community wade. And what I do is I try to refer them to groups of survivors who have been working through these issues. You know, in the book I talk about Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who has been working with these issues, she's a professor at Spelman College, um, and she has been working on these issues and historically Black colleges and universities, and she, she speaks more, more eloquently about how we can approach these problems, as a community problem that can bring together men and women who want change.
Ann: One last question for you. And this is something I found myself wondering about as, um, as I read your book, which is, um, how do you care for yourself and where do you find support as you do this work, which is, you know, as we discussed, you know, a difficult long game, um, where, where are you finding, you know, resilience and, and joy and support in your own life?
Professor Hill: Well, I have numerous resources, you know, I find support, I honestly find comfort in doing the work and engaging with my students who are doing work, and they're so much more informed and more creative than I was at their age about how to get to it. That makes, that gives me hope and inspiration. I am very privileged to have a wonderful family who supports me and colleagues. You know, I always say that in, in, in so many ways, as awful as things were in 1991, I had so many things going for me that many survivors, many victims just don't have. And, and that, you know, I can't give all of that to, to everyone. Although I think with cultural change we can began to, but what I can do is to make sure that they have resources that they need and that, and, and argue for the funding of those resources, which is also a part of violence against women's act, as well as looking forward and taking the long view, changing our culture in our structures to show our support for them and our belief in their value.
Ann: I love that. I really appreciate this book and all of your work and, uh, your time today, it's, it's really been an honor to have you on the podcast.
Professor Hill: Well, I thank you so much and your questions because this is a message that I think can change the world. It can change the world if it gets in the right hands. And we have the courage to act on it.
[interview ends]
Ann: Anita Hill's new book is called Believing: Our Thirty-year Journey to End Gender Violence.
Aminatou: I will see you on the internet, my love.
Ann: See you on the internet.
[outro music]
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our producer is Jordan Bailey and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.