Anita Hill on Talk Easy

model for change. We revisit how my testimony at the 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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

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. 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 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

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 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. 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, 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, 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, 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, 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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

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, 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 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

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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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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