Thirty years ago, Anita Hill became a household name and a hero for many women when she told the world about how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her at work. Today, she joins to talk about her extraordinary life and her new book, “Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.”
Thirty years ago, Anita Hill became a household name and a hero for many women when she told the world about how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her at work. Today, she joins to talk about her extraordinary life and her new book, “Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.”
Debbie Millman:
30 years ago, Anita hill became a household name and a hero for many women when she told the world about how Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her at work. In the years, since she has had a fruitful career as a law professor and as an author. Her latest book is resonating with a lot of people just as her testimony in front of the Senate did in 1991. The book is titled Believing: Our 30 Year Journey to End Gender Violence and we are going to talk about that and her extraordinary life here today. Professor Anita hill, welcome to Design Matters.
Anita Hill:
Oh, it’s a pleasure to be with you,
Debbie Millman:
Anita, is it true that the DC chapter of the women’s club The Wing has a phone booth dedicated to you in their space?
Anita Hill:
Well, I don’t know that it’s true, but I mean, if you say so. I’m flattered to get a wing.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I saw photos of it and people are talking about it and clamoring to get into the booth to make their phone calls. I’m hoping now that you’ll be able to find that.
Anita Hill:
Yes, I’d like to go down and check it out myself.
Debbie Millman:
Anita, you were born on a farm in Oklahoma and are the youngest of 13 children but your family was originally from Arkansas and only went west because your grandfather was threatened with a lynching. He left his farm, took his family, and headed to what is now Wewoka, Oklahoma. How was he able to remake his entire life when he settled there?
Anita Hill:
Yes, that was my maternal grandfather: the story of their leaving with a large number of children of their own. My uncle tells a story of that day when they left Arkansas and says it was the first time that he’d ever seen his father or cry because that had been a place where he was born: a place where his mother raised him. His mother was a freed slave. He was born actually in 1865, so really on the cusp of slavery. And they lived and owned property there, my grandparents. So they were being completely uprooted in part cause of the threat of violence but also I later learned because of a lot of debt that they had accumulated that probably occurred because of his race or their race. And so they started all over, as people do when they run out of options or feel that they’ve run out of options.
Anita Hill:
My uncle George also says that my grandfather just said that he didn’t want to raise his children in that place where he had seen so much hardship, financial hardship, as well as racism. So they moved to Oklahoma and set up there. He was instructed to go to Wewoka because he was told that there would be work there for him. And so that’s where they landed and they did just what they had to do to make it and to improve the lives of their children.
Debbie Millman:
Your parents were also farmers and you’ve written that your childhood was one of a lot of hard work and not much money, but one of solid family affection. Your family farm was a subsistence farm. What does that mean exactly?
Anita Hill:
Well, that means that we were never going to get rich: that we would be lucky from year to year to be able to cover expenses, to feed ourselves, and to maybe bring in enough money to farm again the next year. But, interestingly, even with the large number of children in the household… and not all 13 of us lived together at once. Some of my siblings had already grown up and left home when I was born. But, you know, it was ongoing that we had to feed, at least, and house and clothe at least seven or eight children in a household. Interestingly enough, even though we were not making a lot of money my mother decided that she wanted her children to go to college. So starting with my oldest sister, who is now 94 years old, she managed to save enough money for tuition at Langston University, which was a historically, or is, a historically black university in the state of Oklahoma. She was able to send my sister off to college with the money that we were making doing farm work on our own farm and then at other times farming on other farms.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how it was a rarity where you were growing up for any female to go to college and that your mother was really a visionary in her insistence that you all do that. How else did she influence you? I know that she was very, very important in terms of helping you become who you are.
Anita Hill:
Absolutely, and in ways I don’t think that I knew at the time that she was shaping us. I mean, one of the things that my mother always said was she insisted that we think about everything that we were doing: to think about the consequences of what we were doing. She was… She had only been able to go to school through the sixth grade but she was always curious and she was reading whatever she had available, whether it was her bible or the local Wewoka Daily Times or Readers Digest or whatever she could get her hands on. She was curious about what was going on in the world and really wanted us to have that same curiosity, but not only the curiosity but the ability to fulfill that. But she was a thinking person and I sometimes think what she could have done had she grown up in a different time and had she not had 13 children even growing up in the time that she did. But I think she was quite remarkable.
Anita Hill:
She became a model for me for discipline, for being thoughtful, and also for being generous. She had raised 10 children who graduated from segregated schools, so she experienced segregation. She also had the youngest three who graduated from integrated schools. And I think at every phase, from my oldest sibling to me, and as the youngest, she had a vision that the world was changing, would continue to change, and that she wanted us to be prepared for it.
Debbie Millman:
You had quite a range, as you were growing up, in terms of interests. You had a principal who was white and a family friend, even before you knew him at school, and decided that your school should have a black cheerleader. So he chose you to be a backup for the cheerleaders who’d been selected by popular vote. But you also were shouted for being queer, for doing that by a white kid in your class. Were you bullied a lot as you were growing up?
Anita Hill:
You know, I wasn’t bullied a lot. In addition to being a cheerleader I was vice president of my senior class. I graduated first in my class and I think in some ways that effort and my ability to just really engage in just about every activity that was available protected me to a large extent. The good grades protected me from some bullying. You know, I developed some kind of shield to shield me away from it but that one incident of being called queer I think was probably because there was… I was still a threat: that I was a threat and I had to be othered in ways that might not have been obvious, like my race or my gender. There had to be something else to be attached to my identity that would have made a person who was making the comment more comfortable with himself.
Debbie Millman:
As you mentioned, you graduated first from your high school, number one, and you went on to Oklahoma State University where you got a degree in psychology. Did you want to become a professional psychologist at that point?
Anita Hill:
Well, I had to choose between being a psychologist and being a lawyer and I didn’t choose very scientifically, but initially I wanted to be a scientist. When I got to college I had a freshman advisor who, even though I had high grades and I had high board scores in science and math, this advisor said that he wasn’t sure that I could make it as a scientist. And thinking about it, this was 1973. It was the year after Title IX had passed. He’d grown up in a world where you could legally discriminate against women in education. I mean, you could tell girls that, “No, you can’t take science. You can’t major in science.” That’s not to excuse that.
Anita Hill:
I often think back on what I would have wanted to happen, or what would I want to happen today, so that I could be a scientist if I chose that: if I that was the course that I wanted to take. I wish that I had had an advisor who said, “You know, I understand…” science, biology, was my interest… “is a challenging field and we’re going to do everything that we can to make sure you’re successful.” But instead he said, “You know, don’t do this. Take something easier.” And I guess eventually I decided I would take something which was not so much easier, but which would allow me to be fulfilled and that was to get a law degree. I had the choice to be…
Debbie Millman:
A law degree from Yale would be easier.
Anita Hill:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You showed him.
Anita Hill:
So I didn’t do exactly as I was instructed entirely. I got a bachelor of science in psychology, so that was one concession. Then I went on to law school, which I like to think that in doing so I figured out how to make sure that maybe another generation of young black girls would not be kept out of the sciences.
Debbie Millman:
Were you the first person in your family to go to an Ivy League school?
Anita Hill:
I was, and that was hard not because the lessons were hard… because law school is hard… but because I had never been so far away from my family. I mean, Oklahoma and Connecticut are really-
Debbie Millman:
Different planets.
Anita Hill:
More than the physical distance, they’re very different places. And being in New Haven, an urban area, when I had grown up on this farm in pretty much isolation, it was quite a strain in the first year. But I adapted and I have… Some of those people that I’ve met are still my close friends.
Debbie Millman:
You became a practicing lawyer with the DC firm Ward, [Hardraker 00:12:35], and Ross, which at the time was a famous law firm known for dropping a tobacco company as a client as well as hiring and mentoring women and minorities. What kind of work were you doing there?
Anita Hill:
I was doing banking law, which was… it was interesting. I don’t know that I thought I was going to do banking but it was sort of a general… The time that I was there, they were trying to rotate us through different parts of the law firm: different sections. It was all corporate law. The interesting part to me was how it fit in society. Even then I was thinking about who’s benefiting from these rules that are protecting corporations, mainly, who’s not benefiting from them, and how can you reconcile this in a just society.
Debbie Millman:
In 1981, you were introduced to Judge Clarence Thomas by a mutual friend and when he was appointed assistant secretary of education for civil rights he invited you to become his assistant and you accepted that position. What kind of projects were you working on at that time?
Anita Hill:
There were general education projects. He was in the Office for Civil Rights. He was the assistant secretary for civil rights. So there were a number of race discrimination cases that we were working on: primarily race discrimination at the time. There were some higher ed race cases having to deal with historically black colleges and universities and that was of interest to me because I grew up in a state and my siblings had gone to a historically black college and we were dealing with the underfunding of those colleges that were run by states that just, frankly, were giving much more money to the historically white institutions in their states. But it was exciting work for me. Even though in some ways I enjoyed the work, the corporate work, it just felt personally much more fulfilling to be in an agency where you felt like you were on the right side. That understanding of how the law was protecting some people and not others could be leveled in an agency of the government if we paid the right attention to it and we did it in the right way.
Debbie Millman:
Initially working with Judge Thomas was positive and you had a good deal of responsibility and independence, but after about three months he asked you out on a date. You’ve written about how you believe then, as you do now, that having a social relationship with a person who’s supervising your work is just not a good idea and you declined the date. But he continued to pursue you. One thing that I’ve been wondering about as I’ve been reading your books and watching the various documentaries about this particular time; why do you think he would take no for an answer?
Anita Hill:
You know, I don’t know. I say to people all the time: I hadn’t figured out, or was at the point of where I was trying to figure out, how I was just going to survive Thomas’s behavior. And I don’t mean that in terms of my life but I do mean that in terms of my livelihood and my career and my wellbeing, because it was very stressful to be in that space and being pressured to do something that you knew you were not going to do and you were just trying to figure out a way out. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what was in his head. I said at this point that’s somebody else’s job. I’ve gotten away from it. I’m happy to have done that: escaped it. I think there are plenty of other people who can figure it out and some people who’ve actually written about it. There have been books written, including a book by Jane Meyer and Jill [Abramson 00:17:00]. I’ll leave it to them.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. That is an extraordinary book.
Anita Hill:
But let me just say, in general, in terms of these issues there are many ways, I think many reasons, that people don’t take no for an answer in those situations involving sexual harassment, I think because there’s this feeling of entitlement to harass, entitlement for an individual who is an underling to be submissive to just about any kind of request that a more powerful person has. I think one of the things that people don’t understand about those situations is that we’re not just talking about an injury to the individual, like myself, who is the direct target, but those situations are really harmful to other people who might witness it and experience it and have to work in that kind of environment where they are under the impression that the way to get ahead in a job is to provide sexual favors for the powerful people.
Anita Hill:
I think that there are any… We could speculate about what was going on with Clarence Thomas, but I think the important thing for us to do is to kind of step back and not personalize every experience but try to learn what those experiences mean to all of us: potential employees, the existing employees in an environment. It gives you a sense of what the environment values, what the environment stands for. Is it fairness and justice? And for our organization that’s entirely what it was supposed to be about. Or is it an environment that really just plays lip service to those things is just about power?
Debbie Millman:
And the abuse of power.
Anita Hill:
And bullying of a certain kind and domination of those who are not in those higher positions.
Debbie Millman:
His behavior continued when he was made chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and in the spring of 1983 you accepted an opportunity to teach at Oral Roberts University largely in part because you needed to escape the pressures that you felt working for Judge Thomas. You’ve written about how men aren’t asked why they don’t just leave work situations they detest and before you pointed this out I hadn’t considered that double standard. I couldn’t believe that I’d never considered that, as if it’s the responsibility of the person being abused to figure out a way to stop being abused as opposed to the abuser stopping the abuse. As somebody who has experienced quite a lot of different forms of abuse as a young person, I think that the onus always feels like it’s on the abused to figure out a way out of a situation as opposed to preventing abuse in the first place.
Anita Hill:
Absolutely. I mean, so much of what we put in place to address abuse of any kind. Whether it’s discrimination based on sexual identity or race or gender or harassment or any number of forms of bias and abuse and discrimination that we go have going on, we put in place these structures that put almost the entire burden on the person who is being victimized and we relieve even the abuser from accountability through these structures and we relieve organizations that have put these structures in place of the responsibility of addressing the problems and preventing it to start with.
Anita Hill:
Recently, there was a march this past weekend in France, a women’s march, against what they just call sexist and sexual violence. What they’re asking is for the federal government to raise the amount of money that’s paid to support shelters for women who experience violence and put… add that money and put money and interest and weight behind preventing the problem of sexual violence. That’s what is, in many cases, missing. One, we have to deal with the structures, but really what we… the whole thinking about how to address the problem shouldn’t be one of “Let’s hold people accountable once it happens.” Let’s figure out why it’s happening and try our best to keep it from happening. The solution should be upfront. How do we stop this behavior?
Debbie Millman:
I have a question that I want to ask you just about the time right before the Senate hearings and then I want to talk a bit about the hearings. You joined the faculty at the University of Oklahoma College of Law in 1986 where you taught commercial law and contracts and you became the first tenured African American professor at OU. But at that time were you also considering going to medical school?
Anita Hill:
Yeah. That goes back to that time when I was this freshman in college and I thought I might go into biology, major in biology, and I just loved science. I thought, “Well, is it too late?” YI was considering… and I had talked, actually, to the dean of the law school about what would it take for me to be able to stay on as teaching in law school, or maybe take a leave to take a couple of years to get geared up to becoming a physician. So it was a serious consideration but my life changed shortly thereafter and I never pursued it.
Debbie Millman:
Your life changed in 1991. Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court and as part of the nomination there’s a thorough background check on every candidate. You knew you were going to be a call about your experience working with him and felt it was both a professional duty as a lawyer as well as your ethical responsibility to come forward in the most effective way possible. You responded with a statement in your own words, thinking it would be confidential and that the senators would take it seriously. They ignored it until the letter was leaked to the press. As a result, you were called to give testimony. Do you know how the letter was leaked?
Anita Hill:
No.
Debbie Millman:
But before the hearing, talking about sexual harassment was not the norm at all. Were you worried about what people would think?
Anita Hill:
My worry was, “Am I going to be heard? Will I have a fair opportunity to say what happened to me without being accused of doing something wrong myself by even coming forward?” At the time, what I had said to myself was, “Your job is to say it as clearly as possible what happened to you and why it mattered. It was their job to figure out whether they were going to do something about it”. As long as I kept thinking about that, what my responsibility as a lawyer, as a person who was teaching law students, a person who had taught them to really respect and understand the power of the law and the significance of the Supreme Court… That was my responsibility: to give information about the character and fitness of a person who was about to be appointed for a lifetime position on the country’s highest court.
Debbie Millman:
Aside from sexual harassment, before the hearing sharing any experiences of any gender-based violence was taboo. I was told when I was 11 years old that nobody would believe me if I told anybody and that my… the person who abused me would kill me if I told anyone and I believed him. I believed him and that power structure has stayed in my psyche for decades. You were treated as if you were on trial. At that time, you were accused of lying, you received death threats. You still managed to keep your composure in a way that I’ve never seen anybody be able to do other than maybe Christine Blasey Ford. In many ways, it feels like your testimony was a wake up call for the country. You educated the world, really, about sexual harassment and I want to thank you for that. I think that you saved a lot of people from a lot of harm in the process of doing that.
Anita Hill:
Well, thank you. I mean, I do look back on that time, and there’s so many things that you’ve said that just continue to haunt me. I think about the fact that so many people are still told, “Don’t you dare talk. Don’t you say anything because you will be hurt even more, or your family’s going to be hurt, or your community’s going to be hurt.” So there is this silencing that goes on. There’s a blaming that still goes on where you are told, “If you hadn’t allowed this to happen, it wouldn’t have happened.” Even for children, they’re blamed. Then there’s another form of denial which tells you to think of the pain that you’re experiencing as insignificant.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Walk it off.
Anita Hill:
It’s not that bad.
Debbie Millman:
Exactly.
Anita Hill:
Yeah. Walk it off, shrug it get off or don’t make a big deal out of it. Or even these things like, “I’m sure they were just joking,” or, “Can’t you take a joke? you need to lighten up.” All of these things which say that you have to suffer from your own abuse and your suffering isn’t important to the rest of us. What’s important is protecting the abuser. Those are the kinds of things that we grow up with and I don’t even think we’re cognizant of, and that when we’re telling children, “That’s not so bad,” or we’re telling girls that, “Boys just do that because they like you…”
Debbie Millman:
Right. We’re told in second and third grade, “If he pulls your hair it means he likes you.”
Anita Hill:
How could that be?
Debbie Millman:
What is that? We’re socializing sexual violence in second grade. But I don’t think people fully understand the culture at the time before 1991. When I experienced my abuse I didn’t realize… It was so foreign to me. The whole concept of it was so unbelievable to me that I thought I was the only one in the world that it was happening to. Like, this just didn’t even seem possible. It wasn’t until I saw a letter in Dear Anne [Landers 00:29:49] in the newspaper that I saw that it could happen to other people and cut out the letter and put it under my bed as comfort. But what you did was so important to the lives of so many people. It’s hard to believe that despite your testimony on October 15, 1991, the Senate voted to confirm Clarence Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court by a 52/48 vote. And he is still, 30 years later, on the court today.
Debbie Millman:
One thing that I read about what you would do after was that you thought you’d made a deal with yourself that you would go out and talk about sexual harassment for two years, after which the issue would be fixed and you could go back to teaching. Wondering how that deal with yourself worked out.
Anita Hill:
Well, it’s been 30 years now and I’m still talking about it, so I guess that deal got extended, let’s just say. But one of the things that… and I talk about the hearings from 1991 and all of the things that you have brought up, all of the different tactics of isolating me… I was made to feel that my experience was really absurd and isolated instead of part of our social fabric. I was made to feel my… specifically by Arlan Spectre… problem, what I was talking about, wasn’t that bad. I mean, all of those tactics that we now know are ways to silence and deny people’s experience were full blown during the hearings. They were right there for the public to see and I think that’s why people had this moment where they thought, “This is a real issue. This is something that has been happening in my life that I didn’t even have a name for.”
Anita Hill:
I had an email from an organization that represents girls and they were… the email was about the need for Title IX protecting girls against sexual harassment and assault in schools. This one little girl wrote that she had been assaulted: sexually assaulted. Her first experience was when she was in the first grade and she told the teacher about it. What happened was the teacher ended up suspending her recess privileges because the teacher told the little girl that she was being inappropriate in what she was saying about what had happened to her. So we still have these things going on. That two year deal that I made with myself, I honestly thought that if we have the right number of people coming forward that the laws were going to be sufficient to protect them and that just is not the truth. It’s just not true. There are so many impediments, even to people coming forward, and then even when they do there are more and more impediments to them actually getting justice.
Debbie Millman:
You outline this in extraordinary detail in your new book Believing: Our 30 Year Journey to End Gender Violence. Anita, why the title believing?
Anita Hill:
There’s so many [inaudible 00:33:19] in which it sounds naive now but I went to Washington believing that what I had to say was important and that the Senate should consider it in deciding who was going to be on the Supreme Court. I’ve spent the rest of my life believing that we had systems in place that could fix it. I’ve been disappointed, as you can see, in both cases. But mostly what’s important is that we keep believing that we can do better, that we deserve better, that the things that we have been told about our pain and our experiences, we need to stop believing though those things and to believe in the integrity of our own bodies and our right to be safe and secure wherever we are, whether it’s in our schools or on the streets or in our homes or in our workplaces.
Debbie Millman:
I did a bit of research to prepare for our talk today and I found that the National Crime Victimization Survey… this is a survey that was taken in 2017, so it’s four years old, but I think it’s still really revealing… it found that 77 percent of incidents of rape and sexual assault in the United States were not reported to the police, with fear of not being believed the number one reason. Yet criminologists and social scientists have determined that false allegations of rape are between 2% and 8%, which is in line or less than false allegations of other crimes. Why is it so hard to believe victims of sexual violence? It’s unthinkable to me.
Anita Hill:
Something like you’ve experienced a break in your home and you call the police and say, “My computer was stolen… The officer isn’t trained to say, “I’m not sure we believe you. You’ve got to go through a gauntlet to show…” And even then even then 77% aren’t reported, but that’s just part of the number. The ones that are reported, the police must then determine whether or not they’re going to take action, then the district attorney or prosecutors have to decide whether they’re going to file, go to the court with us. Then they have to determine whether there’s going to be a jury that will hear it. I mean, at every step more and more people fall out of the criminal justice system. Then what we now have come to understand is that it takes multiple victims, sometimes scores of victims. If you look at some of the most egregious cases out there, it took scores of victims for any kind of accountability.
Anita Hill:
We have systems that really are more effective at turning people away who have experienced violence than finding some justice for them. And that’s unexplainable but it’s inexcusable. That’s what I think. We have to move from saying, “I just don’t understand it,” but we shouldn’t stop at that. We should say, “Even if I don’t understand it, there’s no excuse for it. We’ve got to do something about this.”
Debbie Millman:
Why is there this sort of enshrined notion that victims of sexual assault can’t be trusted?
Anita Hill:
It’s cultural. It’s cultural. It goes back to those things that we have been told: that these things don’t matter or we’re making too much of out of it. Therefore the deck’s stacked against us from the beginning, culturally. It’s part of why we create these myths about “You’re just not the right victim. Maybe you should not have been out, or maybe you were drinking, or maybe what would you expect if you were wearing that particular skirt,” or all of these things that we build around our culture that says basically we don’t value women’s voice. And we’re not just talking about people who were assigned that gender at birth. We’re not just… We are talking about people who are trans people who are gender non-binary. We are talking about people who identify as male who may not be seen as tough enough. I mean, if you look at what’s going on in sports… Think about the recent allegations about the National Hockey League and the sexual assault there. What we have is a society and a culture that’s anti-woman, that is anti-things that can be associated with being female, and we have this way that we glorify masculinity, hyper-masculinity, to the point where we say, “That’s just what men do.”
Debbie Millman:
Boys will be boys.
Anita Hill:
We excuse it. So if you think about those two reactions to the feminine and to the masculine and you put them in the context of especially sexual assault but any kind of violence then what you have is a deck stacked in favor of protecting me and those who would be abusers specifically and really abandoning the victims, whatever their gender is.
Debbie Millman:
You write in your book that the more you understood sexual harassment the more you understood how that was just part of the problem of gender and racial inequality. I think that’s also what you’re talking about here. Can you talk a bit about how they are intertwined?
Anita Hill:
Race really is a compounding factor. If you look at the numbers just in terms of who experiences violence, sexual violence included, typically speaking the rates will be higher for women of color. One in every four women generally experience sexual assault and then if you look at native women, that one in every two women experience… Then you understand that there’s a racial factor that has to be considered so that if you do deal with the issues of misogyny that’s only part of the problem that is causing that high rate of abuse of native women. The majority of the abuse and violence against native women come at the hand of nonnative men. That’s an undeniable racial dimension that we cannot neglect or deny, especially if we want to deal with the issue and find solutions.
Debbie Millman:
You write how you see gender violence as a public crisis and that we, as a culture, as a society, haven’t done enough to measure the impact. How can we find ways to measure the impact?
Anita Hill:
First of all, we need to measure the cost to victims. 50 percent of the women who experience sexual harassment will leave their job or their college or wherever they are. They will just leave. I left mine and there’s a cost there. There’s an economic cost there. There are career costs. There are psychological and social costs there that haven’t been calculated. There were four senators, all female, who asked for an accounting for the cost of sexual harassment in our workplaces in the US. They got a letter back acknowledging that there is a cost and they said part of the cost is a health cost. There is a cost in terms of lost productivity, lost wages, leaving jobs, and relocating. There are all these costs. But they also said that none of this has been actually fully calculated. Even the cost to our nationally economy hasn’t been calculated.
Anita Hill:
Why? Why isn’t it calculated? If I had to answer it myself I’d have to say it’s because we haven’t decided that we care enough about it. If we want to solve this problem, if we care enough, if we see how huge and absurdly dangerous it is for us as a society to allow this to go on, if we see that we will measure what it’s costing us because measuring is the only way to get to understanding what we need to do to resolve that. And we always measure what we care about. We need to care more because there’s so much at stake and another generation going through what we know is happening today. Read in the papers every day what is happening.
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah. Look at what happened with Larry Nassar and the Olympians, the hundreds of women, that he assaulted.
Anita Hill:
You can’t pick up the paper without seeing a story. It was this weekend, there was an obituary: a woman who died at the hand of a partner, and it was put in the obituary to tell the world. I think that’s where people are going now. They’re saying, “The world needs to know that this person died at the hand of someone who had probably at some point professed to love her.” We are there now. That’s why I think the important thing for me now is, at the timing of writing this book, believing that we can do better, believing that we deserve to do better by people, that another generation deserves more. I think now we are at this point where we’ve never been before in terms of awareness of the behaviors that are literally killing folks because of their identity.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about the Violence Against Women Act. On September 13, 1984, the Violence Against Women Act was signed by then-President Bill Clinton and the bill was originally sponsored by current President Joe Biden. However, with two recent decisions, the Supreme Court has essentially gutted the Violence Against Women Act and limited the role that government can have in protecting victims and survivors. I have two questions, one more philosophical. Why do you think this happened? And do you think that the Violence Against Women Act can be reinvigorated?
Anita Hill:
I think it can. I think it’s going to take a long time for us to build up to that but the evidence is there. There was contra-evidence and the decision really turned on an interpretation of the law and the facts that said that basically government couldn’t be… federal government had no place providing protections against violence against women because there wasn’t a showing that this violence impacted our country, our economy, our interstate economy. There were mounds of evidence then. The evidence continues to mount and still yet we have this decision out there that doesn’t fit with the law and doesn’t fit with the facts.
Anita Hill:
I think that there really needs to be a more aggressive approach taken by the federal government. All of social change requires lots of work, and there are always grassroots efforts, but ultimately the real change happens when leadership and those efforts come together, act together in concert, to address a problem. We’ve seen our government act in ways to address crises: something like smoking. We’ve seen our government act.
Debbie Millman:
Seat belts.
Anita Hill:
Yeah, seat belts. And of course the pandemic. So we know that at some point what has to happen is that leadership has to respond, and I’m not just talking about government response in terms of leadership. I’m talking about leadership in our different organizations. What is going on in a college that allows someone like Larry Nasser to continue abusing scores of children? That’s the question we have to be asking ourselves. Why isn’t leadership acting? Because we’ve seen the grassroots movements. We’ve seen people taking to the streets around these issues. We’ve seen people going into court systems with very little chance of success but nevertheless doing it themselves. We’ve seen people file complaints with their employers: in many cases, being denied. What we need really is for our institutions to step up and recognize their responsibility to address these issues.
Debbie Millman:
With two justices on the Supreme Court who have been accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault, do you really feel that it’s possible for something like the Violence Against Women Act to be reinvigorated in a way that makes it fair for the citizens of this country?
Anita Hill:
I think that’s where a strategy… There has to be a legal strategy to get there. There has to be a policy strategy to get the act worded in a way that it needs to be. I guess part of what my sense of whether change is possible comes from where we started this conversation. I’ve lived in a family that has experienced change, dramatic change, from thinking about my mother being born in 1911 when there were just so few opportunities for her, but yet when she passed on in a world that was very different and we, her children, continue that legacy of change and making the most of it. So I believe change is possible. It doesn’t happen overnight. Doesn’t happen with one person. But it can’t happen, but it only can happen if we dedicate and commit ourselves to it. Even if at times we feel disappointed and discouraged, we keep up the struggle. We keep up the fight.
Debbie Millman:
Anita, I have two last questions for you but before I ask you the things that I am wanting to close the show with, I’d love to know about some of the things that you’re currently doing. I understand you might have a podcast coming.
Anita Hill:
Yeah. Of course, I’m currently talking about the book, Believing, and sharing those ideas and getting really some interesting conversations going. That sort of leads into the podcast that I’m going to be launching in 2022. We’re calling it Getting Even.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my god that sounds god.
Anita Hill:
It’s not just a revenge podcast. It is actually about how do we balance the scales. How do we get to equity and equality? It’s about solutions. I’m really, really excited to be doing it.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my God, I am too.
Anita Hill:
I feel a bit old and late to the game, but hey, I’m ready.
Debbie Millman:
This is an original idea. I can’t wait to listen to it. Thank you so much for doing that. I have to tell you, I have lots of revenge fantasies that I’ll never act on but… Sort of the way [Michaela Cole 00:51:05] did in the last episode I May Destroy You: sort of that fantasy about different ways outcomes could be different and the ways that you can wrestle back control. I can’t wait to hear what you’re doing.
Anita Hill:
And that’s what it’s about: how can outcomes be different for more than just one or two?
Debbie Millman:
Oh, brava. I can’t wait to hear about it.
Anita Hill:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Okay, and my two last questions. The first is, you write in your book that when you first spoke publicly about your experience of being sexually harassed at 35 years old you were young and patient and when it comes to ending violence and the inequality that it spawns you are no longer patient. You go on to state that gender violence will continue to exist until we change the culture that supports it and the structures that enshrine it. What would you recommend be the first structures we start to look at and change?
Anita Hill:
I think we’ve got to look at… Certainly because I’m a lawyer, I’d say we need to look at the laws that we have in our country, whether they’re the civil rights laws to protect against violence or whether they’re the criminal justice system, both of which in my eyes are failing: failing so many people. There’s plenty of evidence of that. Look at the backlog of rape kits.
Debbie Millman:
Rape kits.
Anita Hill:
That’s a statement in and of itself. But I think the laws need to be challenged and revamped and the protections need to be put in place. I also think, though, that as a culture, I think the way we respond as individuals to people who have been victimized… The skepticism that that defies the reality of what we know to be happening the world… Those 19 million tweets in MeToo meant something. They were telling us something was going on and if you talk to any of your friends you know that they’ve experienced much of what was coming out in social media I think we as a culture need to question ourselves and as individuals in terms of how we personally react and what we tolerate in our schools. Then I think the leadership… Leadership, at this point, if they are not taking robust measures, are part of the problem. We know from these very, very well publicized instances, like the Larry Nasser case, which not involve leadership in terms of the university, but also the FBI in failing to follow up on complaints that were given to them, which enable scores more to be violated.
Debbie Millman:
Just as an aside, I read that the FBI disclosed that it had received more than 4,500 tips about Brett Kavanaugh as he was being considered but only interviewed 10 people after the allegations against him emerged. I think this is another piece of proof that these systems are not working.
Debbie Millman:
Anita, my last question for you is one that I’m hoping will help a lot of women that might be listening. Actually let me rephrase that: helping all people that might be listening. Knowing what you know now, how are ways to show people who have experienced sexual violence that you believe them?
Anita Hill:
First of all, I think we do believe many of those people, we’re just not willing to do something about it. But one of the things that I think we need to do is first we need to listen. We often ask people how they feel and I think that’s important to know how people feel when they’ve been violated, but we also need to engage people who are survivors, who are victims in solutions. That’s the way we show that we really value them: that we don’t just their statements and then go on and make choices based on what we think should happen. We engage them in finding the solutions to their problems and not just putting all of the burden of the solutions to them. I think a real engagement and respect for victims and survivors is what we need to do to show people not only that we believe but that we’re willing to stand up and try to make things right for them.
Debbie Millman:
Anita Hill, thank you for making the world a better place, a more just place, with your work. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Anita Hill:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Anita Hill is a university professor of social policy, law, and women’s gender and sexuality studies at Brandis University. Her latest book is titled Believing: Our 30 Year Journey to End Gender Violence.
Debbie Millman:
This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.