March 11, 2022 • 21 mins
Georgetown Law professor Susan Deller Ross was the only member of Anita Hill’s 1991 legal team who had experience in sexual harassment litigation. Hill and Ross discuss the climate around sexual harassment at the time and reveal new information about the hearing.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Getting Even is produced by Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to
Pushkin Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other
Pushkin shows. Add free and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign
(00:36):
up on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts
or at Pushkin dot Fm. A subject so many Americans
have to confront, sexual harassment. Women were calling and clogging
the switchboards, the question being asked, just where is that
(00:57):
line between friendly relations and sexual harassment? It was hard
to believe it was happening. A Supreme Court nominee on
the verge of confirmation being called back to answer charges
that he had once made unwelcome sexual comments to a female.
Perhaps not ever has so much turned on a single hearing.
There are a couple of things you need to know
(01:19):
about how I came to be sitting in front of
a nationally televised hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on
October eleventh, nineteen ninety one. First, I crafted a statement
for the FBI about working with Clarence Thomas at the
EOC where he sexually harassed me. Then that statement was
(01:40):
leaked to the press. National Public Radio has learned that
the woman brought her accusation to the Senate Judiciary Committee
last month, and finally, after a public outcry, Senator Joe
Biden subpoenaed me to testify. I had three days notice. Remarkably,
my legal team somehow came together for one thing. When
(02:03):
we first talked, it was not even clear they're going
to do anything. We really didn't know whether they were
even going to consider it. That's law professor Susan Dela Ross.
She's an author and she is the director of a
women's human rights clinic at Georgetown University. Ross is one
(02:23):
of the women who pioneered the field of sexual harassment law.
It wasn't until nineteen eighty six that the Supreme Court
ruled sexual harassment a civil rights violation. Five years later,
when I testified that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed me,
it sparked a national conversation, one I never anticipated. Luckily,
(02:49):
I had Susan Dela Ross as part of my legal team.
She was the only one of us who had experienced
with sexual harassment litigation. Somebody on the Senate Judiciary Committee
called me up and gave me a hypothetical and said,
would that constitute sexual harassment? And I said, well, yes,
(03:09):
I thought it would, and he said, can you send
me a memo that would describe what sexual harassment law
consists of? And so I said yes, I'd be happy
to do that, and I sent a memo. And then
a few days later I got another call, this time
saying there was an actual person behind this hypothetical. The
(03:30):
person speaking to me said, would you be willing to
speak to this person? I said yes, I'd be delighted to.
Of course, the person behind this hypothetical was me. I'm
Anita Hill. This is getting even my podcast about equality
and what it takes to get there. On this show,
(03:51):
I'll be speaking with people who are improving are imperfect world,
people who took risks and broke the rules. In the
last episode, you heard from Sakari Hardnett, one of the
witnesses who wasn't called to testify at the nine Thomas
Confirmation hearing. We talked about how being excluded from this
(04:13):
historic conversation impacted her life and the country in the
past three decades. In this episode, Susan Dela Ross and
I try to piece together what else was happening behind
the scenes, much of which the public has never heard.
You and I talked on the telephone before my testimony,
(04:36):
and we were trying to figure out what we were
going to be stepping into and how we could be heard.
We had no notice of what was going on. Senator
Biden called the committee back in session to hear the testimony,
and he called me, and I haven't written down. On
October eighth, in nineteen ninety one, I was told that
(04:56):
I'd be called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yes,
they announced that there's going to be hearing that they're
going to ask you to testify, which you didn't know
before that day. Then you fly to Washington, DC, and
then the very next morning you start testifying there. I
was in Washington, DC, and I think we were all
(05:18):
just shocked by how fast it came about. I was
sitting in a conference room and that was the first
time we met face to face, and we were there
to try to prepare or what was going to be
happening the following day, which was when they told me
that I would be called. It's worn in to testify.
(05:42):
That day, we really didn't know much of anything. We
didn't know who was going to be talking aside from Thomas.
We didn't know whether the committee was trying even to investigate.
Was there ever any real exchange of information about the
process and how it would work. Not, as far as
(06:04):
I'm aware. All we were told was that you were
going to be testified first, and that I got to
call the night before from someone on Biden staff saying, oh, no,
we're going to switch it. We're going to start with
Clarence Thomas, which is peculiar to start with Clarence Thomas
rather than starting with you, who had the account of
(06:26):
what had happened. And the switching of the order allowed
for Clarence Thomas to testify on prime time morning TV
as well, when you know, people are still making their
way to work and still at home watching, so he
had a much morolder viewing audience. So it was just
(06:46):
t J. Yeah. Absolutely, And we knew nothing about information
they had in their hands, but I gather they had
refused to tell you well, and the hearing was about
his character and fitness for the position. There were women
(07:07):
who said that they had experienced or witnessed harassing behavior,
and others knew from their own experience that Thomas was
making sexual advances or using the office to assassin women
who worked at the EOC for their sexual availability to him,
(07:32):
and so there was much that could have been admitted
in terms of witnesses, and I'm particularly struck about the
lack of willingness to hear from those those women who
had experienced something similar or even other experiences that went
to Thomas's character and his fitness for the position. Did
(07:57):
you know about those women? No, I didn't know a thing.
I don't think any of us did. We didn't learn
it until after the fact that there are other women
who worked at the EOC who reported a similar experience.
(08:18):
I only found it out when I read the transcript
of everything after the hearing. That was my first time,
and I was so astounded to see how closely their
accounts mirrored exactly what you had said. But that was
kept from the country. The country never knew that, and
(08:39):
it was the chairman who basically said, we're not going
to hear from the witnesses without explaining what they would
have testified to. So the committee kept them from testifying.
They didn't allow Sukari Hartnett to testify. They did put
it in the record, but nobody knew what it said,
(09:00):
and that was because the committee didn't write a report.
Committees always write a report after they do their work
before forwarding it to the full Senate for a vote.
But there was no committee report assessing the reliability the
credibility of you of him. People were left to try
(09:26):
to piece together what they had seen, which was a
totally incomplete set of facts. So there was very clear evidence.
The media never reported it on afterwards. They shut it
down once he was confirmed. So many of the senators
they just were trying to get rid of it. They
didn't want to talk about it, they didn't want to
(09:47):
explore it, they didn't think it was relevant, they didn't care.
So the general public has never come to learn exactly
what the evidence was that corroborated everything you said. After
the break, Susan Deller Roth and I posed the question,
what if what if the hearings hadn't been so poor
(10:09):
handled in nineteen ninety one, What if we had all
the information available, What if the public had been offered
a better understanding of sexual harassment during the hearing? Where
would we be today? You're listening to getting even my
(10:36):
podcast about equality and what it takes to get there.
I'm Anita Hill, and I'm talking with Susan Deller Ross
the only member of my nineteen ninety one legal team
with experience and sexual harassment law. Do you think that
people had any real awareness even after the nineteen eighty
(10:57):
six decision by the Supreme Court that sexual harassment was
in fact a violation of a law. No. I think
people were very confused by it. Initially, the courts didn't
treat it as an employment discrimination issue at all. They
saw it as sexual activity, and it was sort of
(11:19):
a boys will be boys. What can you expect? And
because the facts are often really atrocious, there's a tendency
in media not to cover what really goes on in
these cases. I remember hearing people saying, Oh, I want
to be sexually harassed. You don't know what's going on.
When you say something like that, well you don't, And
(11:41):
I think you're right. It's a focus on sex and
not even sexual but on sex itself and that being
something normal and overlooking the term harassment. And even the
day when people think about sexual harassment, many people still
think that we're just talking about words, and we're talking
(12:03):
about verbal exchanges and not the psychological and off and
physical harm that is going on in the workplace. And
certainly if we have that today. In nineteen ninety one,
when we sort of jumped into the scene in the
Clarence Thomas case, there was so much confusion. I think
(12:25):
the country would have been even further ahead if it
had gotten some real explanation of what sexual harassment consists
of at the time. Now, I think there was never
less progress, but maybe not as much progress as might
have happened if there had been a real attempt to
grapple with the issue at hand. One of the things
(12:48):
I think really happened was a there were a lot
of women who were very, very upset about how you
were treated, and that convinced a lot of women to
run for office. President Bush, Senor had been vieting a
proposed bill that would expand Title seven to allow victims
(13:09):
of sexual harassment to get damages. After the hearings, he
finally signed because of the pressure of the Republican Party
was under for having supported sexual harasser from the women
who'd been horrified by watching what had happened. There was
publicity around the world about sexual harassment, So I think
(13:31):
if we'd been able to have a full presentation of
what actually happened, with all the sources of evidence that
were relevant, to the issue, people would have had a
better understanding it and gone forward. But nevertheless, it did
make progress, you know. But the fact that there was
an impact shows to me one how people were interested
(13:57):
and they needed to know the information. But it also
indicates to me that there was a lost opportunity, that
there was a powerful platform out there that could have
become a model for how to do this right. We
might have avoided some things in the future, and by
the future, I mean between now in nineteen ninety one
(14:20):
thirty years or so, you know, we might have learned
some lessons that could have been put in place. And
I think about all these what ifs. If there had
been a different kind of investigation by a different body
than the FBI or expert witnesses had been allowed, if
there had been less disinformation or information shared so that
(14:43):
people could respond, we could respond to without this certainly
overwhelming number of witnesses that they had. I had wonderful
witnesses stop up for me to confirm what I had
said to them during the time was exactly what I
was testifying to. And certainly, of course the fact that
(15:04):
the other women weren't called might have made a difference.
But there are still things that are nagging me personally.
You know, I wonder had nine been handled differently, whether
Christine Blasi Fords testimony would have resonated stronger, or whether
(15:25):
the Kavanaugh hearing might have been structured differently. Right, I
had the same feeling of dejan view, here we go again.
You know, they're keeping out relevant evidence, doing everything they
can to shut down what's actually happened. So I'm going
to ask you, what is that one lesson that we
should have learned from nineteen ninety one. Well, I think
(15:48):
it is the importance of really trying to find out
what happened and being willing to get the unpleasant details
out in the open so that people understand what's happening.
Because the basic problem over and over and the hearings
(16:09):
was a failure to put on all the relevant evidence.
There was an instead of an attempt to keep out
relevant evidence to shut it down. And unless you can
hear everything that bears on the credibility of what the
key parties are saying, there's no chance of finding out
the truth. Finding out the truth isn't about finger pointing
(16:33):
or vindication. It's about giving us a starting point for
trying to make things right. As we wrapped up our conversation,
Ross reminded me of another memory from a long time ago.
Just a few weeks after the hearing, we went to
a conference of women elected in offices across the country.
(16:57):
It was a delegation of state legislators, state women legislators
from around the country. We walked in with Anita leading
the way, and suddenly all the women rows, and they
had pink napkins, and they waved the napkins in the air,
and there was just this round of applause for Anita.
(17:18):
Such a contrast with what we had faced on the
Senate committee, with all those white men one side overtly hostile,
the other side sitting quietly and doing nothing. It had
gotten me through the winter. You know, I admire you
so much for the courage you displayed and standing up
(17:41):
and doing what was right, and in your dedication to
these issues over the years ever since. Prior to the
Thomas Confirmation hearing, many people didn't know that sexual harassment
was illegal. Now they do, in part because of the
hearing in nineteen ninety one. But knowing that the law
(18:01):
exists isn't enough to get equality. Victims and their allies
to know how to use the law. One thing that
struck me after speaking with Susan Deller Ross and Sakari Hardnett,
one of the witnesses who wasn't called to testify at
(18:23):
the nineteen ninety one Thomas confirmation hearing, is that even
though the process was imperfect, they both said that they
would do it again. I feel the same way. I
never set out to get mired in a Supreme Court
confirmation hearing, but what I did set out to do,
way back before I ever met Clarence Thomas, was to
(18:45):
tell the truth and to make our country a more
just place. In the rest of the series, I'll be
talking to other people who, like Hardnett and Ross, have
taken risks to make equality more possible, more tangible, people
(19:05):
who I believe we should all be listening to. Next,
I speak with Kimberly Crenshaw, who coined the terms intersectionality
and critical race theory. Race reform has in this country
always been met with a backlash, and sometimes the backlash
(19:27):
was more powerful and lasted longer than the reform. Jet
Getting Even is a production of Pushkin Industries and is
written and hosted by me Anita Hill. It is produced
by Molaboard and Brittany Brown. Our editor is Sarah Kramer,
our engineer is Amanda kay Wang, and our showrunner is
(19:49):
Sasha Matthias. Louis Garat composed original music for the show.
Our executive producers are Mia Lobel and Letal malad. Our
Director of Development is Justine Lane. At Pushkin thanks to
Heather Fame, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrel, Julia Barden, John Schnars,
(20:15):
and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at
Anita Hill and on Facebook at Anita Hill. You can
find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods, and
you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot
f M. If you love this show and others from
(20:36):
Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Subscribe to Pushkin
Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other Pushkin
shows add free and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up
on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
(21:01):
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like
to listen
Pushkin Getting Even is produced by Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to
Pushkin Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other
Pushkin shows. Add free and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign
(00:36):
up on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts
or at Pushkin dot Fm. A subject so many Americans
have to confront, sexual harassment. Women were calling and clogging
the switchboards, the question being asked, just where is that
(00:57):
line between friendly relations and sexual harassment? It was hard
to believe it was happening. A Supreme Court nominee on
the verge of confirmation being called back to answer charges
that he had once made unwelcome sexual comments to a female.
Perhaps not ever has so much turned on a single hearing.
There are a couple of things you need to know
(01:19):
about how I came to be sitting in front of
a nationally televised hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on
October eleventh, nineteen ninety one. First, I crafted a statement
for the FBI about working with Clarence Thomas at the
EOC where he sexually harassed me. Then that statement was
(01:40):
leaked to the press. National Public Radio has learned that
the woman brought her accusation to the Senate Judiciary Committee
last month, and finally, after a public outcry, Senator Joe
Biden subpoenaed me to testify. I had three days notice. Remarkably,
my legal team somehow came together for one thing. When
(02:03):
we first talked, it was not even clear they're going
to do anything. We really didn't know whether they were
even going to consider it. That's law professor Susan Dela Ross.
She's an author and she is the director of a
women's human rights clinic at Georgetown University. Ross is one
(02:23):
of the women who pioneered the field of sexual harassment law.
It wasn't until nineteen eighty six that the Supreme Court
ruled sexual harassment a civil rights violation. Five years later,
when I testified that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed me,
it sparked a national conversation, one I never anticipated. Luckily,
(02:49):
I had Susan Dela Ross as part of my legal team.
She was the only one of us who had experienced
with sexual harassment litigation. Somebody on the Senate Judiciary Committee
called me up and gave me a hypothetical and said,
would that constitute sexual harassment? And I said, well, yes,
(03:09):
I thought it would, and he said, can you send
me a memo that would describe what sexual harassment law
consists of? And so I said yes, I'd be happy
to do that, and I sent a memo. And then
a few days later I got another call, this time
saying there was an actual person behind this hypothetical. The
(03:30):
person speaking to me said, would you be willing to
speak to this person? I said yes, I'd be delighted to.
Of course, the person behind this hypothetical was me. I'm
Anita Hill. This is getting even my podcast about equality
and what it takes to get there. On this show,
(03:51):
I'll be speaking with people who are improving are imperfect world,
people who took risks and broke the rules. In the
last episode, you heard from Sakari Hardnett, one of the
witnesses who wasn't called to testify at the nine Thomas
Confirmation hearing. We talked about how being excluded from this
(04:13):
historic conversation impacted her life and the country in the
past three decades. In this episode, Susan Dela Ross and
I try to piece together what else was happening behind
the scenes, much of which the public has never heard.
You and I talked on the telephone before my testimony,
(04:36):
and we were trying to figure out what we were
going to be stepping into and how we could be heard.
We had no notice of what was going on. Senator
Biden called the committee back in session to hear the testimony,
and he called me, and I haven't written down. On
October eighth, in nineteen ninety one, I was told that
(04:56):
I'd be called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yes,
they announced that there's going to be hearing that they're
going to ask you to testify, which you didn't know
before that day. Then you fly to Washington, DC, and
then the very next morning you start testifying there. I
was in Washington, DC, and I think we were all
(05:18):
just shocked by how fast it came about. I was
sitting in a conference room and that was the first
time we met face to face, and we were there
to try to prepare or what was going to be
happening the following day, which was when they told me
that I would be called. It's worn in to testify.
(05:42):
That day, we really didn't know much of anything. We
didn't know who was going to be talking aside from Thomas.
We didn't know whether the committee was trying even to investigate.
Was there ever any real exchange of information about the
process and how it would work. Not, as far as
(06:04):
I'm aware. All we were told was that you were
going to be testified first, and that I got to
call the night before from someone on Biden staff saying, oh, no,
we're going to switch it. We're going to start with
Clarence Thomas, which is peculiar to start with Clarence Thomas
rather than starting with you, who had the account of
(06:26):
what had happened. And the switching of the order allowed
for Clarence Thomas to testify on prime time morning TV
as well, when you know, people are still making their
way to work and still at home watching, so he
had a much morolder viewing audience. So it was just
(06:46):
t J. Yeah. Absolutely, And we knew nothing about information
they had in their hands, but I gather they had
refused to tell you well, and the hearing was about
his character and fitness for the position. There were women
(07:07):
who said that they had experienced or witnessed harassing behavior,
and others knew from their own experience that Thomas was
making sexual advances or using the office to assassin women
who worked at the EOC for their sexual availability to him,
(07:32):
and so there was much that could have been admitted
in terms of witnesses, and I'm particularly struck about the
lack of willingness to hear from those those women who
had experienced something similar or even other experiences that went
to Thomas's character and his fitness for the position. Did
(07:57):
you know about those women? No, I didn't know a thing.
I don't think any of us did. We didn't learn
it until after the fact that there are other women
who worked at the EOC who reported a similar experience.
(08:18):
I only found it out when I read the transcript
of everything after the hearing. That was my first time,
and I was so astounded to see how closely their
accounts mirrored exactly what you had said. But that was
kept from the country. The country never knew that, and
(08:39):
it was the chairman who basically said, we're not going
to hear from the witnesses without explaining what they would
have testified to. So the committee kept them from testifying.
They didn't allow Sukari Hartnett to testify. They did put
it in the record, but nobody knew what it said,
(09:00):
and that was because the committee didn't write a report.
Committees always write a report after they do their work
before forwarding it to the full Senate for a vote.
But there was no committee report assessing the reliability the
credibility of you of him. People were left to try
(09:26):
to piece together what they had seen, which was a
totally incomplete set of facts. So there was very clear evidence.
The media never reported it on afterwards. They shut it
down once he was confirmed. So many of the senators
they just were trying to get rid of it. They
didn't want to talk about it, they didn't want to
(09:47):
explore it, they didn't think it was relevant, they didn't care.
So the general public has never come to learn exactly
what the evidence was that corroborated everything you said. After
the break, Susan Deller Roth and I posed the question,
what if what if the hearings hadn't been so poor
(10:09):
handled in nineteen ninety one, What if we had all
the information available, What if the public had been offered
a better understanding of sexual harassment during the hearing? Where
would we be today? You're listening to getting even my
(10:36):
podcast about equality and what it takes to get there.
I'm Anita Hill, and I'm talking with Susan Deller Ross
the only member of my nineteen ninety one legal team
with experience and sexual harassment law. Do you think that
people had any real awareness even after the nineteen eighty
(10:57):
six decision by the Supreme Court that sexual harassment was
in fact a violation of a law. No. I think
people were very confused by it. Initially, the courts didn't
treat it as an employment discrimination issue at all. They
saw it as sexual activity, and it was sort of
(11:19):
a boys will be boys. What can you expect? And
because the facts are often really atrocious, there's a tendency
in media not to cover what really goes on in
these cases. I remember hearing people saying, Oh, I want
to be sexually harassed. You don't know what's going on.
When you say something like that, well you don't, And
(11:41):
I think you're right. It's a focus on sex and
not even sexual but on sex itself and that being
something normal and overlooking the term harassment. And even the
day when people think about sexual harassment, many people still
think that we're just talking about words, and we're talking
(12:03):
about verbal exchanges and not the psychological and off and
physical harm that is going on in the workplace. And
certainly if we have that today. In nineteen ninety one,
when we sort of jumped into the scene in the
Clarence Thomas case, there was so much confusion. I think
(12:25):
the country would have been even further ahead if it
had gotten some real explanation of what sexual harassment consists
of at the time. Now, I think there was never
less progress, but maybe not as much progress as might
have happened if there had been a real attempt to
grapple with the issue at hand. One of the things
(12:48):
I think really happened was a there were a lot
of women who were very, very upset about how you
were treated, and that convinced a lot of women to
run for office. President Bush, Senor had been vieting a
proposed bill that would expand Title seven to allow victims
(13:09):
of sexual harassment to get damages. After the hearings, he
finally signed because of the pressure of the Republican Party
was under for having supported sexual harasser from the women
who'd been horrified by watching what had happened. There was
publicity around the world about sexual harassment, So I think
(13:31):
if we'd been able to have a full presentation of
what actually happened, with all the sources of evidence that
were relevant, to the issue, people would have had a
better understanding it and gone forward. But nevertheless, it did
make progress, you know. But the fact that there was
an impact shows to me one how people were interested
(13:57):
and they needed to know the information. But it also
indicates to me that there was a lost opportunity, that
there was a powerful platform out there that could have
become a model for how to do this right. We
might have avoided some things in the future, and by
the future, I mean between now in nineteen ninety one
(14:20):
thirty years or so, you know, we might have learned
some lessons that could have been put in place. And
I think about all these what ifs. If there had
been a different kind of investigation by a different body
than the FBI or expert witnesses had been allowed, if
there had been less disinformation or information shared so that
(14:43):
people could respond, we could respond to without this certainly
overwhelming number of witnesses that they had. I had wonderful
witnesses stop up for me to confirm what I had
said to them during the time was exactly what I
was testifying to. And certainly, of course the fact that
(15:04):
the other women weren't called might have made a difference.
But there are still things that are nagging me personally.
You know, I wonder had nine been handled differently, whether
Christine Blasi Fords testimony would have resonated stronger, or whether
(15:25):
the Kavanaugh hearing might have been structured differently. Right, I
had the same feeling of dejan view, here we go again.
You know, they're keeping out relevant evidence, doing everything they
can to shut down what's actually happened. So I'm going
to ask you, what is that one lesson that we
should have learned from nineteen ninety one. Well, I think
(15:48):
it is the importance of really trying to find out
what happened and being willing to get the unpleasant details
out in the open so that people understand what's happening.
Because the basic problem over and over and the hearings
(16:09):
was a failure to put on all the relevant evidence.
There was an instead of an attempt to keep out
relevant evidence to shut it down. And unless you can
hear everything that bears on the credibility of what the
key parties are saying, there's no chance of finding out
the truth. Finding out the truth isn't about finger pointing
(16:33):
or vindication. It's about giving us a starting point for
trying to make things right. As we wrapped up our conversation,
Ross reminded me of another memory from a long time ago.
Just a few weeks after the hearing, we went to
a conference of women elected in offices across the country.
(16:57):
It was a delegation of state legislators, state women legislators
from around the country. We walked in with Anita leading
the way, and suddenly all the women rows, and they
had pink napkins, and they waved the napkins in the air,
and there was just this round of applause for Anita.
(17:18):
Such a contrast with what we had faced on the
Senate committee, with all those white men one side overtly hostile,
the other side sitting quietly and doing nothing. It had
gotten me through the winter. You know, I admire you
so much for the courage you displayed and standing up
(17:41):
and doing what was right, and in your dedication to
these issues over the years ever since. Prior to the
Thomas Confirmation hearing, many people didn't know that sexual harassment
was illegal. Now they do, in part because of the
hearing in nineteen ninety one. But knowing that the law
(18:01):
exists isn't enough to get equality. Victims and their allies
to know how to use the law. One thing that
struck me after speaking with Susan Deller Ross and Sakari Hardnett,
one of the witnesses who wasn't called to testify at
(18:23):
the nineteen ninety one Thomas confirmation hearing, is that even
though the process was imperfect, they both said that they
would do it again. I feel the same way. I
never set out to get mired in a Supreme Court
confirmation hearing, but what I did set out to do,
way back before I ever met Clarence Thomas, was to
(18:45):
tell the truth and to make our country a more
just place. In the rest of the series, I'll be
talking to other people who, like Hardnett and Ross, have
taken risks to make equality more possible, more tangible, people
(19:05):
who I believe we should all be listening to. Next,
I speak with Kimberly Crenshaw, who coined the terms intersectionality
and critical race theory. Race reform has in this country
always been met with a backlash, and sometimes the backlash
(19:27):
was more powerful and lasted longer than the reform. Jet
Getting Even is a production of Pushkin Industries and is
written and hosted by me Anita Hill. It is produced
by Molaboard and Brittany Brown. Our editor is Sarah Kramer,
our engineer is Amanda kay Wang, and our showrunner is
(19:49):
Sasha Matthias. Louis Garat composed original music for the show.
Our executive producers are Mia Lobel and Letal malad. Our
Director of Development is Justine Lane. At Pushkin thanks to
Heather Fame, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrel, Julia Barden, John Schnars,
(20:15):
and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at
Anita Hill and on Facebook at Anita Hill. You can
find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods, and
you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot
f M. If you love this show and others from
(20:36):
Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Subscribe to Pushkin
Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other Pushkin
shows add free and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up
on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
(21:01):
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like
to listen
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