April 15, 2022 • 53 mins
This week, we're sharing a conversation Anita Hill had on another Pushkin show, Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. Talk Easy is a different kind of interview show, where guests slow down and share how they arrived at the place they're at today—and where they hope to go tomorrow. In this episode, Anita replays the phone call she received from President Biden in 2019, the weight of her decision to speak out against Clarence Thomas, the significance of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court confirmation, her mother's enduring influence, and a poem by Pauli Murray that keeps the song of hope alive in her.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin High listeners. Anita Hill here, while we're hard at
work on new episodes of Gettigeva, I wanted to share
something special this week. It's a recent interview I did
on another Pushkin show, Talk Easy, with Sam Fragoso. Every Sunday,
(00:36):
Sam invites an artist, activists, or politician to come to
the table and speak from the heart. I talked with
him about growing up during the Civil rights era, witnessing
the power of the court, and about following my mother's
model for change. We revisit how my testimony at the
(00:59):
Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearing encouraged survivors of sexual harassment to
come forward, and what the historic confirmation Judge Katangi Brown
Jackson means today. To close, I share a point that
gives me hope by activists Polly Murray. You can hear
(01:21):
more episodes of Talk Easy wherever you get your podcasts,
or at talk easypod dot com. For now, here's my
talk with Sam Fregosa. Anita, what did you have for
breakfast today? I had granola, much healthier than I would do,
(01:43):
but I appreciate it. When you get to be sixty five, Sam,
you might want to switch to granola, but don't push it,
don't rush it. I feel like by the time I
reached thirty five, I may want to switch to granola. Okay, Well,
and you'll know when it's time. Anita Hill, thank you
for being here. It's a pleasure to be talking with you. Well,
(02:06):
I am grateful to have this opportunity with you, and
I just want to jump right in because you have
a new podcast called Getting Even with Anita Hill. What
does getting even in this case mean and look like
to you? Well, in this case, it means getting to equality.
I mean, the podcast is all about equality and how
(02:29):
we can get there. It goes beyond looking at inequalities,
and there are plenty of those out there, and there's
plenty of evidence of it. But I think in this moment,
two years after twenty twenty and which was a year
of reckoning and clarity on a lot of inequalities that
we experience in society, two years later, we're ready for solutions.
(02:54):
And there are people out there with solutions and I
want them to be heard. I want them to be
on my show. I want people to listen and take
away a message that change is possible and that they
can be a part of that change. First few episodes,
you have this mini series called Reimagining nineteen ninety one,
(03:16):
in which you sit with Sakari Hardnett, a witness that
was never called to testify at the confirmation hearing of
Clarence Thomas. You also sit with Georgetown law professor Susan
Dela Ross, who served on your legal team during that hearing.
What has that process been like revisiting nineteen ninety one
in twenty twenty two. Well, most recently I revisited nineteen
(03:38):
ninety one in twenty eighteen when Christine Blasi four testified
and the majority of people around the country who were
viewing it saw a repeat of nineteen ninety one in
her testimony in the Brett Cavanaugh confirmation hearing. It's not
(03:58):
as though I'm revisiting nineteen ninety one for the first
time thirty years later. I think so often over the
past thirty years, we have seen reverberations or echoes of
nineteen ninety one in public processes. So in Revisiting, I
(04:18):
wanted to take people back to nineteen ninety one to
think about the ways that things could have been done differently,
Things that were obviously available for the Senate Judiciary Committee
to hear but that were never allowed into the record,
including witnesses who wanted to testify, who submitted statements that
(04:41):
were relevant to my testimony and to their own experiences.
That was my way of really introducing what we should
be doing now. First of all, we should be taking
all of the evidence in these public hearings. We should
not be excluding individuals from bringing relevant information to our
(05:02):
public processes, especially when it comes to issues of sexual
assault and sexual harassment. We should give women and any
survivor or victim their words should have the same weight
as the words of the nominee. And we've got to
(05:23):
put together the processes that will make sure that things
are weighted evenly. That really does kind of go to
the heart of getting even How do we even the
playing field? And we've got to understand that the process
is important, and if we don't pay attention to the process,
(05:44):
we are going to repeat over and over again the
same problems. Well, let's unpack some of that process. In
nineteen ninety one, on one, Clarence Thomas was nominated for
the Supreme Court by then President Bush. Political appointees typically
receive an extensive FBI background check. But that did not
happen between July one of nineteen ninety one and September
(06:08):
third of nineteen ninety one. And it's that day in
September when you first received contact from the staff of
Senator Howard Metzenbaum, a Democrat from Ohio. As he said
in a sworn statement on page twenty nine of the
Congressional Record for the Senate on October seventh, nineteen ninety one,
Anita Hill was one of three women who worked with
(06:29):
Thomas at the e EOC who were contacted by my staff.
They were asked about a range of women's issues, including
rumors of sexual harassment at the agency. I want to
emphasize and point out that Miss Hill did not make
an allegation against mister Thomas during that September third or
September fourth conversation. On September fifth, Miss Rickey Sideman, a
(06:51):
second labor aid working with then Democratic Senator Ten Kennedy,
called you. As Kennedy said again from that Senate record
I quoted from the call was a systemic review of
people who had worked with Judge Thomas, and Hill indicated
that she needed time to decide whether she was willing
to discuss the issue, the issue being of sexual harassment.
(07:12):
Then on September ninth, you leave a message on the
phone of James Brudney, the Chief Council of Metz and
Baumbs subcommittee. I want to go back to that. What
were you wrestling with in those four days between September
fifth and the ninth. First of all, what I was
wrestling was it was the way that they had framed
the question. They asked not whether I had been sexually harassed,
(07:35):
They asked if I was aware of sexual harassment. The
way the question was framed, I thought that perhaps somebody
else had come forward and was I aware of that
person's situation, And I was only aware of my own.
But I wasn't quite sure that that's what they were
asking for. And I was also grappling with the fact
(07:57):
that these are political processes. The confirmations for the Supreme
Court are highly political. That you do it sounds like, oh,
it's for the Supreme Court. Everybody's concerned about the judiciary
and the legal system. Well, some people are really concerned
or about politics and political power and aligning with political power.
(08:21):
And I was very concerned that this could possibly be
one of those situations. Where there wasn't really any concern
about sexual harassment, but there was just a chance to
make political points, and I didn't want my experience to
be used just for political points. In the end, I
(08:45):
decided that I would step forward because I thought about
what the process should be, and what the process is
billed as is a concerted effort including an investigation into
the character and fitness of a nominee for a position
on the highest court in the country, and it's a
(09:09):
lifetime position. So I decided that I did have something
relevant to say about my own experience, and that if
the Senate Judiciary Committee took it seriously as a process
for vetting an individual's qualifications, which to me includes integrity
(09:30):
and honesty and respect for the law, then they would
take my testimony series. So you signed up because you
had this kind of lingering hope about what the process
could and should look like, knowing all well that the
process was likely to fail. You absolutely think about it.
(09:53):
I'm a lawyer. I was teaching law students at the time.
I'd teach my law students to have respect for the
law and to value process and to really understand that
they should have an investment in making sure the systems work,
and that means participating, not standing on the sidelines. That was,
(10:15):
in part what was driving me. Another thing that was
driving me was the fact that I grew up after
the round versus Board of Education system. I'm the youngest
of thirteen children. Ten of my siblings went to segregated schools.
I and two of my siblings graduated from integrated schools.
Our lives, our opportunities were different because of those different experiences,
(10:39):
so I know firsthand the importance of the court. A
lot of people think of the Supreme Court it's a
remote out there. They don't understand their process, they don't
understand their role, and they don't see how it affects
their lives. But I had grown up believing that the
court affected my life. I saw it was my responsibility,
(11:00):
ultimately to at least challenge the system. You know you're
talking about growing up in Oklahoma, the youngest of thirteen children.
You grew up with the belief that the courts can
affect change. But I also know that you grew up
with the belief that, as your uncle George, your mother's brother,
(11:21):
once said, if you talk about harm done to you,
those people will use it against you. I wonder how
much those words lingered inside of you in that window
of time before deciding to take part in the hearing. Yeah,
those words are part of what we grew up with,
and it's part of what my family had grown up with.
And you know, I was born in nineteen fifty six.
(11:43):
In nineteen fifty six, their segregation was legal. Schools were
being desegregated, not quickly, but we didn't have a Civil
Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, so jobs were segregated,
education was segregated. So it wasn't as though I grew
(12:04):
up in a time where I didn't see that the
law could do bad as well as to do good.
But at the same time, I realized that you have
to take risk for change. I grew up through the
Civil rights era. You know, it was happening on television,
(12:26):
but what I saw was that people were taking risks,
and for them, the risks meant marching with the risk
of being beaten up by police. It meant people fighting
for voting rights, trying to enroll black people to vote
in Mississippi might die. It meant taking risks, real risk,
(12:48):
and so I knew that there was risk. Am I
coming forward, but I had this model in the back
of my head that that's what it takes if you
want change. I took the risk and still held out
hope that some change would come. And I believe that
even though the outcomes of the hearings and the vote
that it clearly wasn't a change that I would have
(13:11):
liked to have come. But change can come in different ways.
That we shouldn't necessarily measure our impact by the change
that comes out of the official process. And that's a
lesson from nineteen ninety one, because we know that since
nineteen ninety one, we have seen change around the issue
(13:34):
of sexual harassment, around the issue of sexual assault, around
the issue of many forms of gender violence. We've seen
people from all ways of life coming forward, people of
all races, people of all genders coming forward talking about
their experiences in the Me Tooth movement. And I like
(13:54):
to believe that nineteen ninety one was a part of that,
But I don't want to rest on that. I want
to hold that moment of risk that you took. On
October eleventh, nine eleven thirty one am you sat alone
in your blue linen suit in a long table in
room three twenty five of the Russell Senate Office Building,
(14:15):
and began your statement in Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearing, Mister Chairman,
Senator Thurma, Members of the Committee. My name is Anita F. Hill,
and I'm a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma.
I was born on a farm in Oakmogee County, Oklahoma,
in nineteen fifty six. I am the youngest of thirteen children.
(14:38):
When you hear that version of yourself at age thirty five,
what do you here? Let the record show that I'm
looking down now because I'm actually visualizing that. Let me
just describe what else was going on. Yes, I was
sitting at that table and I was alone. It wasn't though,
that I was alone in the room. As I looked
(15:00):
to my right, there was a bank of photographers ready
to take a photo of any move that I made.
I remember at one point doing a gesture to my
face or something, or pulling a picking up a glass
of water, and flashes, lights flashing, because everyone, I assume,
thought they were going to capture a moment. I remember,
(15:20):
of course, the bank of people sitting in front of me,
the senators, all white, all male, most of them middle
aged or older, many of whom were entirely incredulous, some
very hostile, some ambivalent. I think everyone was actually ambivalent.
Nobody wanted to be there. They didn't want me to
be there anyway. But I also have a memory of
(15:43):
my family sitting behind me, and my family and friends
were there, and the people who supported me had come
together like magic because they believed that I had the
right to be heard. I really felt that, because my
family was there, because all of those people were there,
(16:04):
that I, in fact did have as close to a
level playing field in that space as anybody could possibly get.
And as long as I kept that in my head,
then I was ready to proceed. You know, you mentioned
some of the incredulous behavior coming from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
(16:26):
If some of their comments were considered insensitive in nineteen
ninety one, they're considered horrifying in twenty twenty two. I'm
thinking now specifically about Senator Howell Heflin, a Democrat from Alabama.
Here he is during the confirmation hearing on October twelfth
of nineteen ninety one. I've got to determine what your
(16:47):
motivation might be. Are you a scorned woman? Do you
have a militant attitude relative to the area of civil rights.
Do you have a modern complex the issue of fantasy
has arisen? Are you interested in writing a book? People
will say, though, that he was not well understood line
(17:09):
of questioning. He was trying to sort of do this
tactic thing to our We'll just put all of these
out here. I think the real antagonism came from people
like Arlen Spector, like Alan Simpson, and like Orn Hatch. Yes,
Howell Heflin, who was a Democrat from the South didn't
do me any favors in a sense, But the direct
(17:31):
hostility really came from the really snide and snarky in
the looks of disdain from those individuals. And then the
worst of it was also from all of the collective
decision led by Joe Biden for not bringing on extra witnesses,
(17:53):
not including all of the information. So it was a
combination of things. It wasn't just one person, It was
the entire culture of the Senate, and it was their
lack of understanding and unwillingness to bring and experts who
could inform them. It was a lack of consideration for
(18:14):
how this hearing was impacting people around the country. And
around the globe. There were so many things that were wrong.
I will tell you this story quickly. You know, I've
been doing some discussions in a podcasts and radio shows
about a book that I wrote, and one woman who
was watching the hearings in nineteen ninety one called up
(18:37):
the radio station and said, you know, I remember nineteen
ninety one. She said, just hearing your voice makes me
sick to the stomach now because I recall what you
went through. So it was all of the above that,
you know, sort of sent people into this like visceral
response of what is happening here? What are our leaders doing?
(19:03):
And can this even be possible? Even in nineteen ninety one,
I think more people today have that feeling. We've moved
since in nineteen ninety one. As a public we understand
that we should not have tolerated all of the innuendos,
Howell Hefflin's innuendos and suggestions. We are a better country
(19:27):
for it, and that's why I think now is the
time for us to move beyond just understanding the problem
and being aware that it's in existence, but now we
should be talking about solutions and repairing the harm that's
been done. Well, I want to talk about the solution
to one problem which I think you alluded to from
(19:48):
Senator Hatch and Senator Simpson, which is this recurrent comment
if she felt unsafe in the fall of nineteen eighty
one at the Department of Education, why did she go
with Thomas when he went to the EOC in April
of nineteen eighty two. Here's Senator Simpson, the Republican from Wyoming,
pursuing the same line of question. If what you say
(20:11):
this man said to you occurred, why in God's name
when he left his position of power or status or
authority over you and you left it in nineteen eighty three,
why in God's name would you ever speak to a
man like that the rest of your life. You describe
(20:34):
some of the psychology of this in your book Believing.
Can you speak on how that response from Thurman, Hatch
and Simpson reflects a kind of collective denial of women's
experiences with abuse and how we may go about fixing
that problem. Well, first of all, it suggests that the
(20:55):
behavior is so exceptional that automatically people are going to
respond and leave it. And the reality is that even
today there are people who are experiencing harassment who are
continuing to live in those situation and work in those
situations because they don't feel they have any other real choices.
(21:16):
I knew that Clarence Thomas was an individual who was
powerful enough to eliminate my livelihood with a single call.
He could make sure that I did not have a job.
And I knew that. And at the time that I
(21:36):
went to the department, I left the Department of Education
and went to the EOC, some of the behavior had
actually stopped. It picked up again that part. I don't
even understand how it picked up again, but I do
understand that I kept wanting nothing more than the behavior
to stop. And I knew that leaving would be a
(22:00):
risk because I would still have to find another job.
And I knew that leaving wouldn't necessarily mean that I
would go to another job where there would be no harassment,
because there is harassment at a lot of jobs. What
you saw in those senators all very powerful men, all
(22:22):
of them very wealthy. It would have been in their
power bubble for so long that they didn't understand vulnerability,
that they didn't understand any kind of vulnerability, let alone
the vulnerability of a young twenty five year old working
in one of our very first professional jobs in a
(22:43):
place like Washington, DC. And I think that's a huge
gap between our leadership and where the average worker is
because I now know the rates of harassment for young
people people in that age group that I was in
when I was working for Thomas. I know how high
(23:05):
the rates are, regardless of whether they moved from a
job you stay. So I think what is missing the
conversation about why do women stay? I think what is
missing is the question of why don't our leaders understand
(23:25):
the experiences of workers everywhere who are not as powerful
as they are, who don't have the resources to bounce back,
whose jobs are not as secure as theirs. Leaders who
can look at situations from the perspective of the people
who are marginalized or more vulnerable. We should expect that
(23:51):
of our representation. If it were truly represented in Congress,
then we would have had somebody who understood what my
experience was, and they wouldn't have had to ask the
questions in the way that they asked them, and maybe
not even had to ask them at all. And if
they did have to ask them, they should have had
an expert help them understand. I'd like to better understand
(24:15):
your experience, because, as you write in your book, believing
survivors insulate themselves with their own form of denial by
adamantly rejecting the notion that they are vulnerable. They develop
a thick skin to defend themselves against being labeled as snowflakes,
not tough enough, over sensitive, and in some cases that
(24:38):
means denying that their own pain exists or that it matters,
either before, during, or after the hearing. Do you think
you participated in some of that insulation? Oh, absolutely I did.
That feeling that I'm describing in the book doesn't come
from our heads. It comes from the culture. The culture
(25:02):
that tells us throughout our lives that what we're experiencing
isn't so bad, That tells us, you know, just get
over it, or don't make a big deal out of it.
Those are the voices that we have heard. So when
we encounter these experiences, that's what comes back to us.
(25:23):
Give this example of the things that we tell children,
and there is an enormous amount of harassment of children
in elementary school, and it can escalate as it moves
up to high school grades and then of course in college,
but often where there is a male who is being
(25:44):
accused of being abusive and a female who is a victim,
you hear two things. One you hear, well, boys will
be boys, and that's just what boys do. So in
that instance, we're telling the victim to accept bad behavior
because it's inevitable, and we're telling the abuser that bad
(26:06):
behavior is acceptable. So that's one message. The other message
is that we tell young girls that boys behave in
these kinds of abusive and sometimes violent ways because they
like them. And in that sense, we're telling girls that
(26:27):
they should welcome a certain level of aggressive, in even
violent attention because it's a sign of their attractiveness and
that they should be submissive to it. Now, what we
are also again telling boys, is that that's the way
that you show your interest, and it's an acceptable way
(26:51):
of showing interest. And so we have to deal with
this as a cultural issue. Instead of telling boys that
this is, you know, okay, because you know you're a
boy and you'll just grow out of it, we should
be teaching more positive ways to interact with folks, that
aggression is not the answer to social relationships. You know,
(27:15):
we could talk endlessly just about what's going on in
our elementary schools. If we don't understand three things. First
of all, the cultural issues that allow for gender violence
and aggression. We aren't understanding the systems that are in
place that are supposed to be protecting people against it,
(27:36):
but really are allowing it to happen. Systems like what
happened in nineteen ninety one and twenty eighteen, and institutions
that support it, like the US Senate, like the Senate
Judiciary Committee, that support really and sort of house this
culture in the systems. And so those are the things
(27:57):
that we have to deal with as a society if
we're going to get beyond where we are. But right now,
what we do is we have systems that put the
entire burden of understanding the problem on the victims, and
as a society, we don't take responsibility for even understanding
what they're going through. And that needs to change. But
(28:22):
I think that there are, you know, there's signs that
we are changing. And the response to Christine blassie Fort
was very different from the response to me. It took
a while to get to the response, but the immediate
response was in Brett Kavanaugh in a majority of the
population Brett Kavanaugh should not be confirmed. That didn't happen
(28:43):
in nineteen ninety one. You know, it's a process of
the society really listening and understanding and hearing from many
people who have survived various forms of abuse. I think
many people watched the twenty eighteen Justice Kavanaugh hearings and
felt it was eerily similar to nineteen ninety one. You
(29:05):
mentioned the cultural response had changed, But something you write
in your book is that one of the things that
are not changed were the structures. And if you don't
change the process, you're going to continue to get the
same outcomes. Now. Of course, the twenty eighteen Senate Judiciary
Committee had more gender and racial diversity, and yet in
(29:27):
spite of that diversity, they reached the same outcome the
committee reached in nineteen ninety one. Why do you think
we often focus on making changes in personnel over changes
in process because it's easier. It's easier for us to
believe that all this is is a behavioral issue instead
(29:48):
of a structural issue. What does that mean, Well, it
means that we don't even think about the process. For
one thing. We just think that, okay, if we put
better people or more sensitive people in a position to
hear a case, then they'll come up with the right decision,
because it's just about, you know, evaluating behavior. But all
(30:12):
the evaluations of behavior take place through the lens of
a process. So in twenty eighteen, when we had an
investigation into Christine blasi Ford's complaint, you still had it
filtered through a lens and a process. For an example,
the President of the United States could say, well, we
(30:34):
don't have to call any additional witnesses, we don't have
to take any into context. We are going to limit
the number of people that the investigators talk to, cutting
out any number of different voices that might have confirmed
what she was saying, or maybe even confirmed what are
you was saying. That is a flawed process. If the
(30:58):
process is flawed, if you don't give people the information
that they need, then it doesn't matter who the people are,
they're not going to be able to necessarily change the outcome.
I think what we have to do is to create
structures that will prevent the kind of conflicts of interest,
(31:22):
the power alignments that occur not because they don't believe
a witness or because the information doesn't exist, but because
it's just easier to side with the powerful people and
exclude the information if it's inconsistent with what the person
(31:43):
in power. In twenty eighteen, that person was Donald Trump.
But think about this. Sam nineteen ninety one, Senator Grassley
was on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thirty years later, he
was chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee. In nineteen ninety one,
he vowed that he would put in place a process
(32:06):
that would prevent nineteen ninety one from half again. In
twenty eighteen, instead of introducing that new process, he doubled
down on the old one. And he did it because
he could do it, because the system allowed him to
do it. I think, if we really want to have
some assurance that this is not going to happen again,
(32:29):
whether it's a Supreme Court nominee or some nominee for
another position, if we want some insurance, we will encourage
our representatives to provide a platform that is a level
platform so that individuals can come forward. Right now, the
(32:50):
balance of power is always going to be against victims,
and we should not have that in our highest bodies
of the government. Putting a pause on the conversation will
be right back with Anita him coming back. You were
(33:22):
talking about the time between nineteen ninety one and twenty
eighteen percenter Grassley, But I'm curious about that time between
nineteen ninety one and twenty nineteen. For Joe Biden. In
ninety one, he was the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In twenty nineteen, he was weighing a presidential bid for
the twenty twenty election. In March of twenty nineteen, you
(33:46):
sat in a hotel room in Houston, Texas, waiting for
a conversation that was nearly twenty eight years in the making,
and then the phone rang. What happened on that call
between you and Joe Biden, Well, the former vice president.
(34:07):
Biden introduced himself, you're being awfully polite about this. Well,
there's a certain kind of politeness that occurs. I mean,
maybe it's a deference to the position of a former
vice president. I don't know, but maybe it's just my
deference to being open to hear. He had been asked
(34:28):
repeatedly by journalists when he was going to apologize. He
had said that he owed me an apology, so I
was open to hearing. I was approached beforehand about whether
I would take a call, and I said, of course,
I'll take a call now. Keep in mind that it
was almost thirty years then, and I had really worked
(34:48):
through a lot of what I had to work through
after nineteen ninety one, and so I was open to
hearing from him. And he did say that he was
very sorry about what happened to me, and that he
took responsibility for what happened to me in that process.
(35:08):
How I still don't think he understood, or he certainly
didn't articulate to me that he understood what had happened
to many other people who were watching. And many of
those people I had heard from since nineteen ninety one,
and they had told me about how much it hurt
(35:31):
to watch those hearings and how they felt that if
I couldn't breakthrough, they would have no chance of breaking through.
I had heard from people on the whole whole range
of behaviors, and including very early on an incest survivor
who said that that Senate Judiciary Committee reminded him of
his family when he had told his family about being
(35:55):
abused by a family member, and his parents rejected his
complaint and sided with the abuser, And how that hearing
resonated with him and brought back those memories. On that
phone call you mentioned, which came in the winter of
nineteen ninety one, he said to you, you've opened a
(36:16):
whole can of worms. Yes, he said, I had opened
a whole can of worms, because up to that time
I had been thinking about sexual harassment, and I had
heard from many sexual harassment victims. But I started to
read the letters and I realized that they weren't limited
to sexual harassment victims. Even before then, when I got
the call and this man said to me that he
(36:40):
had been abused and that I had opened a whole
can of worms, I realized that the experience of nineteen
ninety one wasn't my experience alone. It wasn't just harassment,
It wasn't just women. It was a whole range of people,
and that in that call in twenty nineteen, it just
seemed as though Joe Biden didn't recognize that that he
(37:04):
thought it was just about me, and that he hadn't
absorbed fact that people all over the country were hurt
by nineteen ninety one, and I found later that it
wasn't just people around the country, as people around the globe.
That's was what I was hoping he would understand at
(37:25):
that point he was wanting to be the President of
the United States. As a leader of this country, I
wanted him to be able to address the harm that
was done to the country. That was my big disappointment
that it did not happen that way. I accept the
apology for what happened to me, but I cannot rest
(37:46):
knowing that part of the reason that the apology was
possible was because he could pretend that the rest of
it didn't matter. Part of your surprise seems to come
from the fact that he couldn't recognize all of those experiences,
in part because you received those phone calls, not him. You.
(38:11):
It was a burden you carried that he and the
rest of this Judiciary committee thrust it upon you in
nineteen ninety one. It was your burden suddenly something they created,
and I just wonder how you sit with that. Well,
it should have been their burden. Yeah, it should have
been their burden. It should have been their burden. And
(38:34):
when someone who says I'm an incest survivor and You've
opened a whole can of worms, I don't take that lightly.
I still remember that conversation. I'll never forget that conversation.
It puts a responsibility because it was my testimony, but
it was not just my testimony. It was their response
(38:58):
to my testimony. And that's why it should be their
burden too. And that's why I believe that Joe Biden
should be responding to what happened in nineteen ninety one.
It's never too late to own these issues in our
roles in them, and he should own his. And what
(39:21):
that means for somebody who is a senator or vice
president is different from what it means is someone who
is the president who can put in place measures, who
can call cabinet members to say, we need you to
put together a plan for not only how you're going
to address gender violence as it exists, but how you
(39:42):
are going to work to prevent it, especially when we're
talking about the situations in elementary schools, so we are
passing along a problem to a generation, and I think
that every leader in this country ought to be putting
together a plan for how they're going to make sure
that we don't. Can I ask you just a personal question,
(40:06):
that burden that you've carried a can of worms that
you in fact did not open. Has it weighed you down.
Oh yeah, well, yeah, it does weigh me down. I
feel like people are counting on me. But you know,
I also think it's a great privilege. Again, I go
back to the era that I grew up in and
the fact that, you know, I've watched people on TV
(40:27):
who are bearing burdens heavier than mine, at least visibly heavier,
during the Civil rights movement, and I think it's a
great privilege to be able to after thirty years, to
still be in there trying to make it better. And
so when I look at it that way, I don't
focus on the burden so much as I focus on
(40:49):
the privilege that I have and the opportunity that I
have to take advantage of to move us along so
that maybe it happens less, or maybe it happens a
lot less. I don't spend a lot of time thinking
about the burden because right now I'm maybe at the
end of my career, and I want to focus as
(41:12):
much time and attention as I have to making sure
that no one else has to carry this burden, whether
their own individual situation or the problem of society as
a whole waiting on them. We've been circling that phone
call with President Biden. In your book, you said mostly
(41:32):
Biden talked and I listened. Do you think his nomination
of Judge Katangi Brown Jackson is his way of finally
listening to you. I don't know. I would like to
think that that's part of it, but that's not all
of it. That's not all of it. Yes, this nomination
of Judge Jackson is monumental. I mean, it's historic, and
(41:56):
I'm elated that we're going to have a different kind
of representation on the court, because judicial representation does matter.
And I don't know what kind of judge she'll be
or how she's going to show up in the space
as a justice on the Supreme Court if she's confirmed.
But I know that having a perspective can change everything. Oh,
(42:18):
we only have to cite Bruce Bader Ginsburg. We have
to say Justice Sonya Sotomayor. They have changed the conversation
and sometimes in the dissent, putting in place reasoning that
will move us forward in the future. That's one thing,
but that's not all of it. You know. One of
the things that I say, just about gender violence, generally
(42:41):
we look at it in two ways. Either as a
health issue or as a criminal justice issue. Well, the
issues are well beyond that. You know, the problem reflects
economic issues, it reflects cultural issues, It reflects transportation, it
reflects housing, it reflects education, of course, and I think
we need to do a comprehensive assessment on audit, if
(43:05):
you will, of our government agencies and who should be
in this company station to address the part of it
that affects them. Let me give you one example. Ten
million people will be affected by gentlemen partner violence in
this country, ten million every year. A third of those
people will become homeless because of that, Think about all
(43:28):
of the ways that they're going to be affected. If
they have children, their education will be affected. If they
have a job, their job may be affected if they
become homeless. We don't have a comprehensive plan to address
even what happens after. But I also think that we
need to be addressing some things in ways that will
prevent the problems from happening. And we know that people
(43:52):
are vulnerable to violence based on income, low income people,
So how do we make sure that that doesn't happen.
Is it a matter of increasing income, Is it a
matter of putting it into place other kinds of labor
protections or other kinds of civil rights protection that really
speak to the experiences of low income people or contract workers.
(44:14):
So I think that there is so much more to
be done, but somebody has to be at the top,
and that person who is at the top has to
commit to making this a priority. There's so much more
to be done, and it sounds like, despite everything that's
happened to you, that you hold out hope that it
will be done. I do. I've seen a country move forward.
(44:37):
I know people are ready for change. I mean, we
had this moment of reckoning around inequalities in twenty twenty
where all of these inequities were revealed through the pandemic,
and one of the things that was revealed was through
a spike in intimate partner violence. Well, what that says
to me, it's not just that a pandemic causes intimate
(44:58):
partner violence. What it says is that some people are
living in situations where something could happen like a pandemic,
like a lockdown, like an economic down to her that
will put them at bodily risk. And so, yes, you know,
we have this moment where we had the Me Too movement,
(45:21):
where we've had Black Lives Matter, where we have this
cry for a different way to address inequalities. And when
it comes down to it, gender violence, sexual harassment, sexual
assault in many ways comes from gender inequality. So how
do we address those things? I am hopeful because I
(45:43):
think we have come so far, and I hope that
means that we are really ready to take the next
step and demand real change. That hope you have today,
I wonder how much of that comes from your mother.
She was born in nineteen eleven and the Jim Crow
South in a country that did not recognize her right
(46:04):
to vote. And yet you say, and insisting that her
children get an educatecasion that far exceeded the opportunities available
to them at the time, she showed her belief that
the world would change for the better and that her
children would be prepared to enjoy the benefits. And thinking
about your work, do you see yourself as continuing the
(46:25):
work your mother was doing for you? I'm following in
her footsteps, I'm following her model, and I'm expanding it.
I don't have biological children. We were her platform. Our
household was her platform. She had control over that and
she knew she couldn't control all the rest of the world,
(46:46):
but she could give her children something that would change
their lives. I feel like I have a platform that
she never had to work outside of my own immediate family.
I feel I had the opportunity. I feel that I
have public sentiment and support with me, and so, Yes,
(47:08):
my world is different for my mother's, but the model
is the same. How do we prepare people even though
we know that the opportunities aren't immediately available. We want
them to be ready when the future comes and the
opportunities are there. Throughout her life, she held on the hope,
(47:29):
and you have to. No matter how frequently it has
been tested, both in public and in private, it has
remained in you and all of your work. Before we go,
I thought perhaps we could read a poem on the subject,
a piece that I know means a great deal to you. Yes,
this is a poem, Dark Testament. It's verse eight, and
(47:52):
it's a poem written by Polly Murray. Hope is a
crushed stack between clenched finger's Hope is a bird's wing
broken by a stone. Hope is a word and a
tuneless ditty, a word whispered with the wind, a dream
of forty acres and a mule, a cabin of one's own,
and a moment to rest, A name and place for
(48:14):
one's children and children's children. At last, Hope is a
song and a weary throat. Give me a song of
hope and a world where I can sing it. Give
me a song of faith and a people to believe
in it. Give me a song of kindliness and a
country where I can live it. Give me a song
(48:36):
of hope and love and a brown girl's heart to
hear it. What did that poem make you think of? Oh?
You know, I do focus on that song hope. It's
a song and a weary throat, And I don't think
of myself necessarily as an optimist. When I think of
that phrase alone, I think and concentrate on the song,
(49:00):
not the weary throat, because we will get weary and
there will be chances for us to rest. But as
long as we have a song, we have hope. I
will keep thinking it. I will always remain hopeful no
matter how we are Again, well, I thank you for
that song, for all that you've done in the last
(49:22):
sixty five years of your life. I don't know where
we'd be without you, But I'm very grateful to be
passing through in this time with you. Thank you. That's wonderful.
That gives me hope. Anita Hill, thank you for sitting
with me. It's a pleasure and that's our show special
(50:40):
thanks to Nicole Mrano and of course, Professor Anita Hill.
You can hear her new podcast, Getting Even with Anita
Hill wherever you like to listen. To learn more about
Anita's work, visit our show notes at talk easypod dot com.
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(51:03):
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(52:30):
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(53:14):
Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll
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Until then, stay safe and so Lo
Pushkin High listeners. Anita Hill here, while we're hard at
work on new episodes of Gettigeva, I wanted to share
something special this week. It's a recent interview I did
on another Pushkin show, Talk Easy, with Sam Fragoso. Every Sunday,
(00:36):
Sam invites an artist, activists, or politician to come to
the table and speak from the heart. I talked with
him about growing up during the Civil rights era, witnessing
the power of the court, and about following my mother's
model for change. We revisit how my testimony at the
(00:59):
Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearing encouraged survivors of sexual harassment to
come forward, and what the historic confirmation Judge Katangi Brown
Jackson means today. To close, I share a point that
gives me hope by activists Polly Murray. You can hear
(01:21):
more episodes of Talk Easy wherever you get your podcasts,
or at talk easypod dot com. For now, here's my
talk with Sam Fregosa. Anita, what did you have for
breakfast today? I had granola, much healthier than I would do,
(01:43):
but I appreciate it. When you get to be sixty five, Sam,
you might want to switch to granola, but don't push it,
don't rush it. I feel like by the time I
reached thirty five, I may want to switch to granola. Okay, Well,
and you'll know when it's time. Anita Hill, thank you
for being here. It's a pleasure to be talking with you. Well,
(02:06):
I am grateful to have this opportunity with you, and
I just want to jump right in because you have
a new podcast called Getting Even with Anita Hill. What
does getting even in this case mean and look like
to you? Well, in this case, it means getting to equality.
I mean, the podcast is all about equality and how
(02:29):
we can get there. It goes beyond looking at inequalities,
and there are plenty of those out there, and there's
plenty of evidence of it. But I think in this moment,
two years after twenty twenty and which was a year
of reckoning and clarity on a lot of inequalities that
we experience in society, two years later, we're ready for solutions.
(02:54):
And there are people out there with solutions and I
want them to be heard. I want them to be
on my show. I want people to listen and take
away a message that change is possible and that they
can be a part of that change. First few episodes,
you have this mini series called Reimagining nineteen ninety one,
(03:16):
in which you sit with Sakari Hardnett, a witness that
was never called to testify at the confirmation hearing of
Clarence Thomas. You also sit with Georgetown law professor Susan
Dela Ross, who served on your legal team during that hearing.
What has that process been like revisiting nineteen ninety one
in twenty twenty two. Well, most recently I revisited nineteen
(03:38):
ninety one in twenty eighteen when Christine Blasi four testified
and the majority of people around the country who were
viewing it saw a repeat of nineteen ninety one in
her testimony in the Brett Cavanaugh confirmation hearing. It's not
(03:58):
as though I'm revisiting nineteen ninety one for the first
time thirty years later. I think so often over the
past thirty years, we have seen reverberations or echoes of
nineteen ninety one in public processes. So in Revisiting, I
(04:18):
wanted to take people back to nineteen ninety one to
think about the ways that things could have been done differently,
Things that were obviously available for the Senate Judiciary Committee
to hear but that were never allowed into the record,
including witnesses who wanted to testify, who submitted statements that
(04:41):
were relevant to my testimony and to their own experiences.
That was my way of really introducing what we should
be doing now. First of all, we should be taking
all of the evidence in these public hearings. We should
not be excluding individuals from bringing relevant information to our
(05:02):
public processes, especially when it comes to issues of sexual
assault and sexual harassment. We should give women and any
survivor or victim their words should have the same weight
as the words of the nominee. And we've got to
(05:23):
put together the processes that will make sure that things
are weighted evenly. That really does kind of go to
the heart of getting even How do we even the
playing field? And we've got to understand that the process
is important, and if we don't pay attention to the process,
(05:44):
we are going to repeat over and over again the
same problems. Well, let's unpack some of that process. In
nineteen ninety one, on one, Clarence Thomas was nominated for
the Supreme Court by then President Bush. Political appointees typically
receive an extensive FBI background check. But that did not
happen between July one of nineteen ninety one and September
(06:08):
third of nineteen ninety one. And it's that day in
September when you first received contact from the staff of
Senator Howard Metzenbaum, a Democrat from Ohio. As he said
in a sworn statement on page twenty nine of the
Congressional Record for the Senate on October seventh, nineteen ninety one,
Anita Hill was one of three women who worked with
(06:29):
Thomas at the e EOC who were contacted by my staff.
They were asked about a range of women's issues, including
rumors of sexual harassment at the agency. I want to
emphasize and point out that Miss Hill did not make
an allegation against mister Thomas during that September third or
September fourth conversation. On September fifth, Miss Rickey Sideman, a
(06:51):
second labor aid working with then Democratic Senator Ten Kennedy,
called you. As Kennedy said again from that Senate record
I quoted from the call was a systemic review of
people who had worked with Judge Thomas, and Hill indicated
that she needed time to decide whether she was willing
to discuss the issue, the issue being of sexual harassment.
(07:12):
Then on September ninth, you leave a message on the
phone of James Brudney, the Chief Council of Metz and
Baumbs subcommittee. I want to go back to that. What
were you wrestling with in those four days between September
fifth and the ninth. First of all, what I was
wrestling was it was the way that they had framed
the question. They asked not whether I had been sexually harassed,
(07:35):
They asked if I was aware of sexual harassment. The
way the question was framed, I thought that perhaps somebody
else had come forward and was I aware of that
person's situation, And I was only aware of my own.
But I wasn't quite sure that that's what they were
asking for. And I was also grappling with the fact
(07:57):
that these are political processes. The confirmations for the Supreme
Court are highly political. That you do it sounds like, oh,
it's for the Supreme Court. Everybody's concerned about the judiciary
and the legal system. Well, some people are really concerned
or about politics and political power and aligning with political power.
(08:21):
And I was very concerned that this could possibly be
one of those situations. Where there wasn't really any concern
about sexual harassment, but there was just a chance to
make political points, and I didn't want my experience to
be used just for political points. In the end, I
(08:45):
decided that I would step forward because I thought about
what the process should be, and what the process is
billed as is a concerted effort including an investigation into
the character and fitness of a nominee for a position
on the highest court in the country, and it's a
(09:09):
lifetime position. So I decided that I did have something
relevant to say about my own experience, and that if
the Senate Judiciary Committee took it seriously as a process
for vetting an individual's qualifications, which to me includes integrity
(09:30):
and honesty and respect for the law, then they would
take my testimony series. So you signed up because you
had this kind of lingering hope about what the process
could and should look like, knowing all well that the
process was likely to fail. You absolutely think about it.
(09:53):
I'm a lawyer. I was teaching law students at the time.
I'd teach my law students to have respect for the
law and to value process and to really understand that
they should have an investment in making sure the systems work,
and that means participating, not standing on the sidelines. That was,
(10:15):
in part what was driving me. Another thing that was
driving me was the fact that I grew up after
the round versus Board of Education system. I'm the youngest
of thirteen children. Ten of my siblings went to segregated schools.
I and two of my siblings graduated from integrated schools.
Our lives, our opportunities were different because of those different experiences,
(10:39):
so I know firsthand the importance of the court. A
lot of people think of the Supreme Court it's a
remote out there. They don't understand their process, they don't
understand their role, and they don't see how it affects
their lives. But I had grown up believing that the
court affected my life. I saw it was my responsibility,
(11:00):
ultimately to at least challenge the system. You know you're
talking about growing up in Oklahoma, the youngest of thirteen children.
You grew up with the belief that the courts can
affect change. But I also know that you grew up
with the belief that, as your uncle George, your mother's brother,
(11:21):
once said, if you talk about harm done to you,
those people will use it against you. I wonder how
much those words lingered inside of you in that window
of time before deciding to take part in the hearing. Yeah,
those words are part of what we grew up with,
and it's part of what my family had grown up with.
And you know, I was born in nineteen fifty six.
(11:43):
In nineteen fifty six, their segregation was legal. Schools were
being desegregated, not quickly, but we didn't have a Civil
Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, so jobs were segregated,
education was segregated. So it wasn't as though I grew
(12:04):
up in a time where I didn't see that the
law could do bad as well as to do good.
But at the same time, I realized that you have
to take risk for change. I grew up through the
Civil rights era. You know, it was happening on television,
(12:26):
but what I saw was that people were taking risks,
and for them, the risks meant marching with the risk
of being beaten up by police. It meant people fighting
for voting rights, trying to enroll black people to vote
in Mississippi might die. It meant taking risks, real risk,
(12:48):
and so I knew that there was risk. Am I
coming forward, but I had this model in the back
of my head that that's what it takes if you
want change. I took the risk and still held out
hope that some change would come. And I believe that
even though the outcomes of the hearings and the vote
that it clearly wasn't a change that I would have
(13:11):
liked to have come. But change can come in different ways.
That we shouldn't necessarily measure our impact by the change
that comes out of the official process. And that's a
lesson from nineteen ninety one, because we know that since
nineteen ninety one, we have seen change around the issue
(13:34):
of sexual harassment, around the issue of sexual assault, around
the issue of many forms of gender violence. We've seen
people from all ways of life coming forward, people of
all races, people of all genders coming forward talking about
their experiences in the Me Tooth movement. And I like
(13:54):
to believe that nineteen ninety one was a part of that,
But I don't want to rest on that. I want
to hold that moment of risk that you took. On
October eleventh, nine eleven thirty one am you sat alone
in your blue linen suit in a long table in
room three twenty five of the Russell Senate Office Building,
(14:15):
and began your statement in Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearing, Mister Chairman,
Senator Thurma, Members of the Committee. My name is Anita F. Hill,
and I'm a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma.
I was born on a farm in Oakmogee County, Oklahoma,
in nineteen fifty six. I am the youngest of thirteen children.
(14:38):
When you hear that version of yourself at age thirty five,
what do you here? Let the record show that I'm
looking down now because I'm actually visualizing that. Let me
just describe what else was going on. Yes, I was
sitting at that table and I was alone. It wasn't though,
that I was alone in the room. As I looked
(15:00):
to my right, there was a bank of photographers ready
to take a photo of any move that I made.
I remember at one point doing a gesture to my
face or something, or pulling a picking up a glass
of water, and flashes, lights flashing, because everyone, I assume,
thought they were going to capture a moment. I remember,
(15:20):
of course, the bank of people sitting in front of me,
the senators, all white, all male, most of them middle
aged or older, many of whom were entirely incredulous, some
very hostile, some ambivalent. I think everyone was actually ambivalent.
Nobody wanted to be there. They didn't want me to
be there anyway. But I also have a memory of
(15:43):
my family sitting behind me, and my family and friends
were there, and the people who supported me had come
together like magic because they believed that I had the
right to be heard. I really felt that, because my
family was there, because all of those people were there,
(16:04):
that I, in fact did have as close to a
level playing field in that space as anybody could possibly get.
And as long as I kept that in my head,
then I was ready to proceed. You know, you mentioned
some of the incredulous behavior coming from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
(16:26):
If some of their comments were considered insensitive in nineteen
ninety one, they're considered horrifying in twenty twenty two. I'm
thinking now specifically about Senator Howell Heflin, a Democrat from Alabama.
Here he is during the confirmation hearing on October twelfth
of nineteen ninety one. I've got to determine what your
(16:47):
motivation might be. Are you a scorned woman? Do you
have a militant attitude relative to the area of civil rights.
Do you have a modern complex the issue of fantasy
has arisen? Are you interested in writing a book? People
will say, though, that he was not well understood line
(17:09):
of questioning. He was trying to sort of do this
tactic thing to our We'll just put all of these
out here. I think the real antagonism came from people
like Arlen Spector, like Alan Simpson, and like Orn Hatch. Yes,
Howell Heflin, who was a Democrat from the South didn't
do me any favors in a sense, But the direct
(17:31):
hostility really came from the really snide and snarky in
the looks of disdain from those individuals. And then the
worst of it was also from all of the collective
decision led by Joe Biden for not bringing on extra witnesses,
(17:53):
not including all of the information. So it was a
combination of things. It wasn't just one person, It was
the entire culture of the Senate, and it was their
lack of understanding and unwillingness to bring and experts who
could inform them. It was a lack of consideration for
(18:14):
how this hearing was impacting people around the country. And
around the globe. There were so many things that were wrong.
I will tell you this story quickly. You know, I've
been doing some discussions in a podcasts and radio shows
about a book that I wrote, and one woman who
was watching the hearings in nineteen ninety one called up
(18:37):
the radio station and said, you know, I remember nineteen
ninety one. She said, just hearing your voice makes me
sick to the stomach now because I recall what you
went through. So it was all of the above that,
you know, sort of sent people into this like visceral
response of what is happening here? What are our leaders doing?
(19:03):
And can this even be possible? Even in nineteen ninety one,
I think more people today have that feeling. We've moved
since in nineteen ninety one. As a public we understand
that we should not have tolerated all of the innuendos,
Howell Hefflin's innuendos and suggestions. We are a better country
(19:27):
for it, and that's why I think now is the
time for us to move beyond just understanding the problem
and being aware that it's in existence, but now we
should be talking about solutions and repairing the harm that's
been done. Well, I want to talk about the solution
to one problem which I think you alluded to from
(19:48):
Senator Hatch and Senator Simpson, which is this recurrent comment
if she felt unsafe in the fall of nineteen eighty
one at the Department of Education, why did she go
with Thomas when he went to the EOC in April
of nineteen eighty two. Here's Senator Simpson, the Republican from Wyoming,
pursuing the same line of question. If what you say
(20:11):
this man said to you occurred, why in God's name
when he left his position of power or status or
authority over you and you left it in nineteen eighty three,
why in God's name would you ever speak to a
man like that the rest of your life. You describe
(20:34):
some of the psychology of this in your book Believing.
Can you speak on how that response from Thurman, Hatch
and Simpson reflects a kind of collective denial of women's
experiences with abuse and how we may go about fixing
that problem. Well, first of all, it suggests that the
(20:55):
behavior is so exceptional that automatically people are going to
respond and leave it. And the reality is that even
today there are people who are experiencing harassment who are
continuing to live in those situation and work in those
situations because they don't feel they have any other real choices.
(21:16):
I knew that Clarence Thomas was an individual who was
powerful enough to eliminate my livelihood with a single call.
He could make sure that I did not have a job.
And I knew that. And at the time that I
(21:36):
went to the department, I left the Department of Education
and went to the EOC, some of the behavior had
actually stopped. It picked up again that part. I don't
even understand how it picked up again, but I do
understand that I kept wanting nothing more than the behavior
to stop. And I knew that leaving would be a
(22:00):
risk because I would still have to find another job.
And I knew that leaving wouldn't necessarily mean that I
would go to another job where there would be no harassment,
because there is harassment at a lot of jobs. What
you saw in those senators all very powerful men, all
(22:22):
of them very wealthy. It would have been in their
power bubble for so long that they didn't understand vulnerability,
that they didn't understand any kind of vulnerability, let alone
the vulnerability of a young twenty five year old working
in one of our very first professional jobs in a
(22:43):
place like Washington, DC. And I think that's a huge
gap between our leadership and where the average worker is
because I now know the rates of harassment for young
people people in that age group that I was in
when I was working for Thomas. I know how high
(23:05):
the rates are, regardless of whether they moved from a
job you stay. So I think what is missing the
conversation about why do women stay? I think what is
missing is the question of why don't our leaders understand
(23:25):
the experiences of workers everywhere who are not as powerful
as they are, who don't have the resources to bounce back,
whose jobs are not as secure as theirs. Leaders who
can look at situations from the perspective of the people
who are marginalized or more vulnerable. We should expect that
(23:51):
of our representation. If it were truly represented in Congress,
then we would have had somebody who understood what my
experience was, and they wouldn't have had to ask the
questions in the way that they asked them, and maybe
not even had to ask them at all. And if
they did have to ask them, they should have had
an expert help them understand. I'd like to better understand
(24:15):
your experience, because, as you write in your book, believing
survivors insulate themselves with their own form of denial by
adamantly rejecting the notion that they are vulnerable. They develop
a thick skin to defend themselves against being labeled as snowflakes,
not tough enough, over sensitive, and in some cases that
(24:38):
means denying that their own pain exists or that it matters,
either before, during, or after the hearing. Do you think
you participated in some of that insulation? Oh, absolutely I did.
That feeling that I'm describing in the book doesn't come
from our heads. It comes from the culture. The culture
(25:02):
that tells us throughout our lives that what we're experiencing
isn't so bad, That tells us, you know, just get
over it, or don't make a big deal out of it.
Those are the voices that we have heard. So when
we encounter these experiences, that's what comes back to us.
(25:23):
Give this example of the things that we tell children,
and there is an enormous amount of harassment of children
in elementary school, and it can escalate as it moves
up to high school grades and then of course in college,
but often where there is a male who is being
(25:44):
accused of being abusive and a female who is a victim,
you hear two things. One you hear, well, boys will
be boys, and that's just what boys do. So in
that instance, we're telling the victim to accept bad behavior
because it's inevitable, and we're telling the abuser that bad
(26:06):
behavior is acceptable. So that's one message. The other message
is that we tell young girls that boys behave in
these kinds of abusive and sometimes violent ways because they
like them. And in that sense, we're telling girls that
(26:27):
they should welcome a certain level of aggressive, in even
violent attention because it's a sign of their attractiveness and
that they should be submissive to it. Now, what we
are also again telling boys, is that that's the way
that you show your interest, and it's an acceptable way
(26:51):
of showing interest. And so we have to deal with
this as a cultural issue. Instead of telling boys that
this is, you know, okay, because you know you're a
boy and you'll just grow out of it, we should
be teaching more positive ways to interact with folks, that
aggression is not the answer to social relationships. You know,
(27:15):
we could talk endlessly just about what's going on in
our elementary schools. If we don't understand three things. First
of all, the cultural issues that allow for gender violence
and aggression. We aren't understanding the systems that are in
place that are supposed to be protecting people against it,
(27:36):
but really are allowing it to happen. Systems like what
happened in nineteen ninety one and twenty eighteen, and institutions
that support it, like the US Senate, like the Senate
Judiciary Committee, that support really and sort of house this
culture in the systems. And so those are the things
(27:57):
that we have to deal with as a society if
we're going to get beyond where we are. But right now,
what we do is we have systems that put the
entire burden of understanding the problem on the victims, and
as a society, we don't take responsibility for even understanding
what they're going through. And that needs to change. But
(28:22):
I think that there are, you know, there's signs that
we are changing. And the response to Christine blassie Fort
was very different from the response to me. It took
a while to get to the response, but the immediate
response was in Brett Kavanaugh in a majority of the
population Brett Kavanaugh should not be confirmed. That didn't happen
(28:43):
in nineteen ninety one. You know, it's a process of
the society really listening and understanding and hearing from many
people who have survived various forms of abuse. I think
many people watched the twenty eighteen Justice Kavanaugh hearings and
felt it was eerily similar to nineteen ninety one. You
(29:05):
mentioned the cultural response had changed, But something you write
in your book is that one of the things that
are not changed were the structures. And if you don't
change the process, you're going to continue to get the
same outcomes. Now. Of course, the twenty eighteen Senate Judiciary
Committee had more gender and racial diversity, and yet in
(29:27):
spite of that diversity, they reached the same outcome the
committee reached in nineteen ninety one. Why do you think
we often focus on making changes in personnel over changes
in process because it's easier. It's easier for us to
believe that all this is is a behavioral issue instead
(29:48):
of a structural issue. What does that mean, Well, it
means that we don't even think about the process. For
one thing. We just think that, okay, if we put
better people or more sensitive people in a position to
hear a case, then they'll come up with the right decision,
because it's just about, you know, evaluating behavior. But all
(30:12):
the evaluations of behavior take place through the lens of
a process. So in twenty eighteen, when we had an
investigation into Christine blasi Ford's complaint, you still had it
filtered through a lens and a process. For an example,
the President of the United States could say, well, we
(30:34):
don't have to call any additional witnesses, we don't have
to take any into context. We are going to limit
the number of people that the investigators talk to, cutting
out any number of different voices that might have confirmed
what she was saying, or maybe even confirmed what are
you was saying. That is a flawed process. If the
(30:58):
process is flawed, if you don't give people the information
that they need, then it doesn't matter who the people are,
they're not going to be able to necessarily change the outcome.
I think what we have to do is to create
structures that will prevent the kind of conflicts of interest,
(31:22):
the power alignments that occur not because they don't believe
a witness or because the information doesn't exist, but because
it's just easier to side with the powerful people and
exclude the information if it's inconsistent with what the person
(31:43):
in power. In twenty eighteen, that person was Donald Trump.
But think about this. Sam nineteen ninety one, Senator Grassley
was on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thirty years later, he
was chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee. In nineteen ninety one,
he vowed that he would put in place a process
(32:06):
that would prevent nineteen ninety one from half again. In
twenty eighteen, instead of introducing that new process, he doubled
down on the old one. And he did it because
he could do it, because the system allowed him to
do it. I think, if we really want to have
some assurance that this is not going to happen again,
(32:29):
whether it's a Supreme Court nominee or some nominee for
another position, if we want some insurance, we will encourage
our representatives to provide a platform that is a level
platform so that individuals can come forward. Right now, the
(32:50):
balance of power is always going to be against victims,
and we should not have that in our highest bodies
of the government. Putting a pause on the conversation will
be right back with Anita him coming back. You were
(33:22):
talking about the time between nineteen ninety one and twenty
eighteen percenter Grassley, But I'm curious about that time between
nineteen ninety one and twenty nineteen. For Joe Biden. In
ninety one, he was the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In twenty nineteen, he was weighing a presidential bid for
the twenty twenty election. In March of twenty nineteen, you
(33:46):
sat in a hotel room in Houston, Texas, waiting for
a conversation that was nearly twenty eight years in the making,
and then the phone rang. What happened on that call
between you and Joe Biden, Well, the former vice president.
(34:07):
Biden introduced himself, you're being awfully polite about this. Well,
there's a certain kind of politeness that occurs. I mean,
maybe it's a deference to the position of a former
vice president. I don't know, but maybe it's just my
deference to being open to hear. He had been asked
(34:28):
repeatedly by journalists when he was going to apologize. He
had said that he owed me an apology, so I
was open to hearing. I was approached beforehand about whether
I would take a call, and I said, of course,
I'll take a call now. Keep in mind that it
was almost thirty years then, and I had really worked
(34:48):
through a lot of what I had to work through
after nineteen ninety one, and so I was open to
hearing from him. And he did say that he was
very sorry about what happened to me, and that he
took responsibility for what happened to me in that process.
(35:08):
How I still don't think he understood, or he certainly
didn't articulate to me that he understood what had happened
to many other people who were watching. And many of
those people I had heard from since nineteen ninety one,
and they had told me about how much it hurt
(35:31):
to watch those hearings and how they felt that if
I couldn't breakthrough, they would have no chance of breaking through.
I had heard from people on the whole whole range
of behaviors, and including very early on an incest survivor
who said that that Senate Judiciary Committee reminded him of
his family when he had told his family about being
(35:55):
abused by a family member, and his parents rejected his
complaint and sided with the abuser, And how that hearing
resonated with him and brought back those memories. On that
phone call you mentioned, which came in the winter of
nineteen ninety one, he said to you, you've opened a
(36:16):
whole can of worms. Yes, he said, I had opened
a whole can of worms, because up to that time
I had been thinking about sexual harassment, and I had
heard from many sexual harassment victims. But I started to
read the letters and I realized that they weren't limited
to sexual harassment victims. Even before then, when I got
the call and this man said to me that he
(36:40):
had been abused and that I had opened a whole
can of worms, I realized that the experience of nineteen
ninety one wasn't my experience alone. It wasn't just harassment,
It wasn't just women. It was a whole range of people,
and that in that call in twenty nineteen, it just
seemed as though Joe Biden didn't recognize that that he
(37:04):
thought it was just about me, and that he hadn't
absorbed fact that people all over the country were hurt
by nineteen ninety one, and I found later that it
wasn't just people around the country, as people around the globe.
That's was what I was hoping he would understand at
(37:25):
that point he was wanting to be the President of
the United States. As a leader of this country, I
wanted him to be able to address the harm that
was done to the country. That was my big disappointment
that it did not happen that way. I accept the
apology for what happened to me, but I cannot rest
(37:46):
knowing that part of the reason that the apology was
possible was because he could pretend that the rest of
it didn't matter. Part of your surprise seems to come
from the fact that he couldn't recognize all of those experiences,
in part because you received those phone calls, not him. You.
(38:11):
It was a burden you carried that he and the
rest of this Judiciary committee thrust it upon you in
nineteen ninety one. It was your burden suddenly something they created,
and I just wonder how you sit with that. Well,
it should have been their burden. Yeah, it should have
been their burden. It should have been their burden. And
(38:34):
when someone who says I'm an incest survivor and You've
opened a whole can of worms, I don't take that lightly.
I still remember that conversation. I'll never forget that conversation.
It puts a responsibility because it was my testimony, but
it was not just my testimony. It was their response
(38:58):
to my testimony. And that's why it should be their
burden too. And that's why I believe that Joe Biden
should be responding to what happened in nineteen ninety one.
It's never too late to own these issues in our
roles in them, and he should own his. And what
(39:21):
that means for somebody who is a senator or vice
president is different from what it means is someone who
is the president who can put in place measures, who
can call cabinet members to say, we need you to
put together a plan for not only how you're going
to address gender violence as it exists, but how you
(39:42):
are going to work to prevent it, especially when we're
talking about the situations in elementary schools, so we are
passing along a problem to a generation, and I think
that every leader in this country ought to be putting
together a plan for how they're going to make sure
that we don't. Can I ask you just a personal question,
(40:06):
that burden that you've carried a can of worms that
you in fact did not open. Has it weighed you down.
Oh yeah, well, yeah, it does weigh me down. I
feel like people are counting on me. But you know,
I also think it's a great privilege. Again, I go
back to the era that I grew up in and
the fact that, you know, I've watched people on TV
(40:27):
who are bearing burdens heavier than mine, at least visibly heavier,
during the Civil rights movement, and I think it's a
great privilege to be able to after thirty years, to
still be in there trying to make it better. And
so when I look at it that way, I don't
focus on the burden so much as I focus on
(40:49):
the privilege that I have and the opportunity that I
have to take advantage of to move us along so
that maybe it happens less, or maybe it happens a
lot less. I don't spend a lot of time thinking
about the burden because right now I'm maybe at the
end of my career, and I want to focus as
(41:12):
much time and attention as I have to making sure
that no one else has to carry this burden, whether
their own individual situation or the problem of society as
a whole waiting on them. We've been circling that phone
call with President Biden. In your book, you said mostly
(41:32):
Biden talked and I listened. Do you think his nomination
of Judge Katangi Brown Jackson is his way of finally
listening to you. I don't know. I would like to
think that that's part of it, but that's not all
of it. That's not all of it. Yes, this nomination
of Judge Jackson is monumental. I mean, it's historic, and
(41:56):
I'm elated that we're going to have a different kind
of representation on the court, because judicial representation does matter.
And I don't know what kind of judge she'll be
or how she's going to show up in the space
as a justice on the Supreme Court if she's confirmed.
But I know that having a perspective can change everything. Oh,
(42:18):
we only have to cite Bruce Bader Ginsburg. We have
to say Justice Sonya Sotomayor. They have changed the conversation
and sometimes in the dissent, putting in place reasoning that
will move us forward in the future. That's one thing,
but that's not all of it. You know. One of
the things that I say, just about gender violence, generally
(42:41):
we look at it in two ways. Either as a
health issue or as a criminal justice issue. Well, the
issues are well beyond that. You know, the problem reflects
economic issues, it reflects cultural issues, It reflects transportation, it
reflects housing, it reflects education, of course, and I think
we need to do a comprehensive assessment on audit, if
(43:05):
you will, of our government agencies and who should be
in this company station to address the part of it
that affects them. Let me give you one example. Ten
million people will be affected by gentlemen partner violence in
this country, ten million every year. A third of those
people will become homeless because of that, Think about all
(43:28):
of the ways that they're going to be affected. If
they have children, their education will be affected. If they
have a job, their job may be affected if they
become homeless. We don't have a comprehensive plan to address
even what happens after. But I also think that we
need to be addressing some things in ways that will
prevent the problems from happening. And we know that people
(43:52):
are vulnerable to violence based on income, low income people,
So how do we make sure that that doesn't happen.
Is it a matter of increasing income, Is it a
matter of putting it into place other kinds of labor
protections or other kinds of civil rights protection that really
speak to the experiences of low income people or contract workers.
(44:14):
So I think that there is so much more to
be done, but somebody has to be at the top,
and that person who is at the top has to
commit to making this a priority. There's so much more
to be done, and it sounds like, despite everything that's
happened to you, that you hold out hope that it
will be done. I do. I've seen a country move forward.
(44:37):
I know people are ready for change. I mean, we
had this moment of reckoning around inequalities in twenty twenty
where all of these inequities were revealed through the pandemic,
and one of the things that was revealed was through
a spike in intimate partner violence. Well, what that says
to me, it's not just that a pandemic causes intimate
(44:58):
partner violence. What it says is that some people are
living in situations where something could happen like a pandemic,
like a lockdown, like an economic down to her that
will put them at bodily risk. And so, yes, you know,
we have this moment where we had the Me Too movement,
(45:21):
where we've had Black Lives Matter, where we have this
cry for a different way to address inequalities. And when
it comes down to it, gender violence, sexual harassment, sexual
assault in many ways comes from gender inequality. So how
do we address those things? I am hopeful because I
(45:43):
think we have come so far, and I hope that
means that we are really ready to take the next
step and demand real change. That hope you have today,
I wonder how much of that comes from your mother.
She was born in nineteen eleven and the Jim Crow
South in a country that did not recognize her right
(46:04):
to vote. And yet you say, and insisting that her
children get an educatecasion that far exceeded the opportunities available
to them at the time, she showed her belief that
the world would change for the better and that her
children would be prepared to enjoy the benefits. And thinking
about your work, do you see yourself as continuing the
(46:25):
work your mother was doing for you? I'm following in
her footsteps, I'm following her model, and I'm expanding it.
I don't have biological children. We were her platform. Our
household was her platform. She had control over that and
she knew she couldn't control all the rest of the world,
(46:46):
but she could give her children something that would change
their lives. I feel like I have a platform that
she never had to work outside of my own immediate family.
I feel I had the opportunity. I feel that I
have public sentiment and support with me, and so, Yes,
(47:08):
my world is different for my mother's, but the model
is the same. How do we prepare people even though
we know that the opportunities aren't immediately available. We want
them to be ready when the future comes and the
opportunities are there. Throughout her life, she held on the hope,
(47:29):
and you have to. No matter how frequently it has
been tested, both in public and in private, it has
remained in you and all of your work. Before we go,
I thought perhaps we could read a poem on the subject,
a piece that I know means a great deal to you. Yes,
this is a poem, Dark Testament. It's verse eight, and
(47:52):
it's a poem written by Polly Murray. Hope is a
crushed stack between clenched finger's Hope is a bird's wing
broken by a stone. Hope is a word and a
tuneless ditty, a word whispered with the wind, a dream
of forty acres and a mule, a cabin of one's own,
and a moment to rest, A name and place for
(48:14):
one's children and children's children. At last, Hope is a
song and a weary throat. Give me a song of
hope and a world where I can sing it. Give
me a song of faith and a people to believe
in it. Give me a song of kindliness and a
country where I can live it. Give me a song
(48:36):
of hope and love and a brown girl's heart to
hear it. What did that poem make you think of? Oh?
You know, I do focus on that song hope. It's
a song and a weary throat, And I don't think
of myself necessarily as an optimist. When I think of
that phrase alone, I think and concentrate on the song,
(49:00):
not the weary throat, because we will get weary and
there will be chances for us to rest. But as
long as we have a song, we have hope. I
will keep thinking it. I will always remain hopeful no
matter how we are Again, well, I thank you for
that song, for all that you've done in the last
(49:22):
sixty five years of your life. I don't know where
we'd be without you, But I'm very grateful to be
passing through in this time with you. Thank you. That's wonderful.
That gives me hope. Anita Hill, thank you for sitting
with me. It's a pleasure and that's our show special
(50:40):
thanks to Nicole Mrano and of course, Professor Anita Hill.
You can hear her new podcast, Getting Even with Anita
Hill wherever you like to listen. To learn more about
Anita's work, visit our show notes at talk easypod dot com.
On the site, you'll find our back catalog of over
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