Since her exemplary display of courage in 1991, testifying against Clarence Thomas and making him publicly accountable as a sexual harasser, Anita Hill has been—and remains—a veritable pillar of advocacy, an iconic figure adamant about gender equity for all. Her book Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey To End Gender Violence—whose paperback edition published Sept. 27 has a new preface—outlines the omnipresence of gender violence and its insinuation into every nook of American society. She inspects its endemic nature across variations from physical brutality to overt slander to subtle psychological manipulation. At the judicial level, she unpacks how legal jargon minimizes the damage that abusive behavior inflicts with its imprecise language, giving the abuser ample room to maneuver without any restitution for the victim. This vexing setup trickles down to allow for rampant injustices within social structures, yielding a broken and precarious culture.
Drawing on her years as an educator and legal scholar, as well as on the manifold experiences and stories that have been relayed to her empathetic ear, she examines power breaches in domestic space, academic space, corporate space, and at the political level. Hill details the ways in which this toxicity affects not only those subjected to it, but how these experiences ripple ever outward to mangle social safety at large.
Measured and poised, she discussed, over the course of an hour phone conversation, the way generational debates have (and haven’t) evolved, the way employee empowerment can strongarm businesses into safer policies, and the animated TV series that has portrayed gender issues with surprising nuance.
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You’ve added a new preface to the paperback edition of Believing. Could you talk about re-situating what you published in 2020, and deciding to add another layer in framing it?
A lot of what I did during the book tour, during the pandemic, was virtual. This gave me a chance to access more people than I would have had in person. The only problem with that was that it was less personal—and the topic of gender-based violence, which is the topic of Believing, is personal. I think having those face-to-face conversations could have been effective, even if the number of people I got a chance to speak with wasn’t as high.
We were all so focused on how we were going to get beyond the health catastrophe and the social catastrophe that was the pandemic… However! Many people who had been struggling with this issue were ready to discuss it: whether or not we had been making any progress, whether or not there were people out there actually doing substantive things to solve the problem, whether it was more than a movement of people sharing their stories. I had a rallying cry that came from a friend of mine: It’s time to stop admiring the problem and to find solutions. That was one of the things that was driving me.
In terms of this approach to solutions: you talk about how leadership has to set the tone, and how people with power who can implement change have to be on board. At one point, you use the word “sincere”: they have to be sincere about stopping gender-based violence. That makes sense—but the reality is that we have extremely problematic leadership. People in power have refused to engage with and implement things, be it judicially or in a corporate setting—there’s so much resistance from the people who could implement change. In terms of a solution, how do we make people in power empathize, or at least take their duty seriously?
I believe individuals and communities really are seeking their own solutions. But it is piecemeal. There’s not this vast movement or organization really taking on the solution at a national level in this country. There are organizations working, there’s a network of people who are committed to this. It doesn’t exist in a way that would allow the message to get to some of those leaders. I’m sure there are groups that have attempted to address it on a government level, but it hasn’t resonated because the issue has become so political. And in that sense, it’s not like many issues that we know exists, that we know need to be addressed. I mean, just take violence overall. We know it needs to be addressed. But when it comes down to finding solutions in Washington, there is this political divide, where things just don’t happen. Even though everyone can agree that there’s a problem. The solutions aren’t forthcoming, because the political will, or the political interest, hasn’t converged to make that a problem that this country will take on as a unified front.
And I think, just as there needs to be political movement in this direction, there’s resistance in the corporate world, because—as you say—some of the corporate leaders are compromised personally. But the other reason that there is this reticence to take a stand against violence in the workplace—harassment and sexual violence included—is because there’s this fear of corporate liability and loss of reputation. The same thing can be said of schools, universities in particular. Those kinds of things have impeded progress.
Right: caginess overrides any desire to implement changes.
I think it’s a false perception that you can continue to protect a reputation and avoid scandal. We’ve seen in universities around the country: the situation is that you do become part of a public conversation. With Larry Nassar, the physician who was abusing students for decades, there’s evidence after the fact that the University of Michigan made all of this effort to hide that they have this serial abuser on staff and in a position of authority. It was for naught, because people knew, and eventually the word got out and the problem was made worse—as opposed to them acknowledging the problem, and then doing something about it, without having to put students in this position of being the messenger about this abuse.
The idea that you’re going to hide, that your reputation will be protected, isn’t viable today. Because there are too many ways for word to get out and for people to know about what’s happening in these different spaces.
There are too many ways to leak and diffuse information.
Yeah. And it’s just a terrible betrayal of the people who are in your community—to force them to be the one to take action, instead of leadership taking action.
Of course. Having taught in universities in a longstanding way, I found it interesting that you framed your career not as teaching for many decades, but as teaching several generations. From an educator’s vantage point, how have you seen generations differ in their approach to gender-based violence? Or conversely, have certain cultural aspects remained ongoing in a classroom setting?
I think it’s still that individuals who have faced problems of abuse in their school are hesitant to come forward. They fear the stigma, they fear that they won’t be believed, they fear that if they are bullied, nothing will be done about it—or that they will, in fact, be punished for coming forward. So that, unfortunately, remains true… maybe not as true as when I first started teaching. Clearly, students are more likely to come forward today, but there still is that element of fear. Having said that, I think there’s a new understanding about an individual’s right to step forward. And the level of self-blame has certainly diminished. In the ’80s, anyone who’d been victimized had been conditioned to believe that what was happening to them was their fault. That, I think, is no longer the case. Or it’s less the case.
What has not changed is that the system requires action from people who have been abused. That’s the system for responding to these problems: We depend too heavily on abused people being able to come forward and weather a storm because they have stepped up and made clear what’s happened to them. It goes back to this situation we were talking about earlier, which is that leadership is not responding differently. They’re not taking the reins, and saying, I don’t want to lead an organization where I know people are being abused. And I don’t want to simply rely on the most vulnerable to change the culture of my institution. So I think that’s where I’m hoping we are headed. And there are—for me—rays of hope. There are some leaders who are stepping up. Partly because they see this as a moral imperative. But in other instances, they’re stepping up because people within their organization are demanding it.
Removing—or at least lessening—this sense of shame around abuse is also progressing through other avenues. You talk about being part of the Hollywood Commission, and it was interesting that you brought up cultural and pop cultural references providing new narratives, like an episode of the show Big Mouth. Could you talk about new narratives, or cultural touchstones—beyond the university or the judicial system, avenues not related to an institution, per se?
Yeah, not related to the law. I wanted people to look at the problem from a social and cultural perspective. Yes, the legal cases are important. But also things like Big Mouth [laughs], an adult cartoon with children, interestingly, could really inform us about where we are today. The younger generation is dismissing the messages that came before as—excuse my French—bullshit. For years, we have been teaching kids about how to protect themselves: They should not allow other people to invade their bodies and their space, and we’ve been telling them that they have a right to protest this kind of invasion and abuse. I think they are ready to take that lesson to another level, which is, not only should they have the sanctity of their own bodies, but when they’re violated, people should be held accountable, socially and culturally. And if we do that, maybe we will lessen the number of court cases and criminal violations.
Yes, although of course the legal aspect of regulating gender-based violence is also horrifically backwards. To me, the most shocking about reading your book was understanding how much margin the law allows in favor of the abuser, just by the way things are written. Today, what is actionable in terms of changing those parameters or making the language more precise, more accountable? Is that evolving at all? Who is helping push that forward?
From a legal point of view, yes, there are organizations working on—have been working for years on—gender equity in the workplace. The National Women’s Law Center is just one of them. But there are organizations all around the country fighting gender discrimination in the courts, and they’re pushing for more expanded language and a better, real world understanding of what’s happening in our workplaces.
But at the same time, in court, there’s pushback against that movement. There is—has always been—this balance between the workers’ experience and the corporate interest. I think, unfortunately, in the Supreme Court, we are seeing a trend more toward protecting the employers. In the book, I talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s reaction to that, and the trend by more conservative justices toward really narrowing the protections altogether of anti-discrimination law that was passed in 1964 in the Civil Rights Act. We seem to be chipping away at those protections that we thought existed—and even those protections that the people who wrote the law envisioned. They’re doing it by minimizing the behavior that is happening, excusing that behavior, allowing for abuse. Instead of taking an approach that, that when someone is abused in the workplace, in ways that inhibit their ability to do their job—from touching to slurs to saying that women aren’t capable or competent, despite all the evidence to the contrary—they shouldn’t have to experience that and should be given relief. And even though this is happening over and over again, it doesn’t “rise” to a violation of a civil rights protection. Even though, when you are experiencing bad treatment, you are harmed, because it just makes it harder for you to do your job! But that’s not being recognized, universally, as a problem. The courts have said: That doesn’t rise to the level of a Title VII violation.
It’s vicious to diminish women’s experience in this way: to refuse to acknowledge the toxic toll those experiences take.
To bring that to 2022, people are saying, I would rather stay at home, or I want to withdraw from the workforce altogether. We have evidence that racial minorities and women feel that they can do their job more effectively working from a home environment than from a workplace environment, where they have these, I guess we call them “microaggressions,” directed at them. I think that’s a reflection of the fact that we have just allowed so much of this behavior to go on—and then the pandemic has given people a relief from some of that behavior, and they now realize how harmful it is to them, and don’t want to go back into it.
Right, understandably.
So, I think we got lessons from the pandemic about what is happening in our workplace, whether it’s bullying or harassment, sexual harassment, sexual assault, slurs, insults about an individual’s capability based on their identity. All of those things now should be taken into account as we do return to the office or small businesses. We need to look at what they’re returning to, and how we can fix it, so that you can have a more productive economy and better workplaces, safer workplaces, for everyone.
In the book, you mention this idea of untraining, as opposed to training: rather than learning new behaviors, it’s draining a person of problematic behavior. Could talk a bit more about this idea of revision as opposed to starting over completely?
What I think we need to understand is that when abuse happens in an organization, it affects everybody in the organization. And there are people who are just fed up with it! What we have do is train people to respond, and they need coaching and training on how to respond. There are ways we can change a culture by not necessarily going directly at the abuser, but at the people around them, who want something better. And so I think that’s one of the things that we have to focus on, is how we are training people to be active bystanders in their own work experience, to make sure that they don’t assume that the only way for change to occur is for them to just complain about that behavior—that they can be active in designing, if you will, the kind of workplace that they wanted.
Again, it goes back to the big questions about what the workplace will look like once we are done with a pandemic. One element of that should be the empowerment of employees, to make sure that the workplace they go into is safe for everyone.
Have you seen a shift in terms of who is reading your books? Are you seeing more men engage, or is it just disproportionately women who feel implicated by this fight?
I absolutely believe that it goes beyond women who are victimized. I think that there are people in the workplace, all genders, who haven't necessarily been targeted, but don’t want to work in a workforce with where other people are. Because other people feel the harm as well; they feel the burden of that kind of workplace.
One encouraging example is from gaming, of all places [laughs]. Activision Blizzard really was at the top of the gaming industry—given the popularity of their products and following that they have among gamers—but Activision Blizzard really kind of fell apart because the leadership had allowed abuse to go unchecked. Employees made demands and threatened to walk out… and Activision Blizzard was sold. This is a company that was making so much money that people thought no one would be able to buy them. But after the employees got involved to protest the sexual harassment that was going on—and I understand now they’re protesting work conditions generally—they were able to force change. It wasn’t just women who walked out. Women were among the organizers, but they had colleagues who got involved with the movement and realized that it was bad for them.
I think what we are going to see more and more corporate worker activism to address issues of workplace abuses. I think that’s very encouraging. The leadership will be forced to respond. What I would prefer is leadership take a stand earlier on, before things get completely toxic in the workforce. But I am encouraged by worker advocacy. I’m also encouraged that shareholders are now promoting efforts to hold leadership accountable and require more reporting on what’s going on around issues of sexual harassment, as well as diversity and inclusion in the workforce. Those kinds of activities are new, but they can have a tremendous impact on cultural change within organizations. You can make those changes if you’re a company, and still make money, and actually might even make more money. It’s not an either/or: Well, I can either get rid of abuse and discrimination and harassment, or I can make money. That’s faulty thinking. You can do both. In fact, we know that safer and more diverse workforces can operate even more efficiently than those where there’s toxicity and turmoil.
Right. But that’s underpinned by a capitalist desire: to have a workforce that is cohesive so that it can be profitable. Beyond the workplace, in communities in general, there should be a desire to eliminate gender-based violence, because it is unhealthy to have in society. Not motivated by profit, but just for the health of a society. Without the business motivation, can that translate to having the empathy and wanting a healthy community? Or is would you say that is too idealistic to implement?
Of course I think we should be doing it because it’s the right thing to do. I come at this as a person who was born in the ’50s and grew up with civil rights, and believe that the civil rights movement was about making our country better, not wealthier. My approach is you will make a better workplace if you end abuse. Period. But I also understand that corporations operate differently: they operate with a profit motive. So it’s unfortunate that the leaders have to be convinced that you can make a profit to argue for any kind of change. I think they’re now starting to see the issues as not just about making more money, but about creating an environment people want to be a part of. There are certainly methods that come from movements within communities, where they’re not looking at making profit: they’re just wanting to make the community safer for everyone.
We have also some lessons in medicine about inclusion in healthcare and research, which have become much more cognizant of the need for equity: racial equity, gender equity. I think there are lessons there that corporate America can absorb and maybe adapt to their own situation. I don’t know who will lead that movement around solutions. But the pieces are out there, the messages are out there, the examples are out there. How do we scale those up to include more and more individuals who exist in our communities?
You used the term “rays of hope.” Do you have any rituals or mantras for when you feel, like, depleted? How do you keep regenerating that hope?
Yeah… how do I regenerate? I remember, really, how far we’ve come since 1991. How the conversation has changed. Recently, there were two stories about widespread abuse at a high school ROTC program. There’s an investigation into the Southern Baptist Church about abuses that had been taking place on a seemingly systemic basis. So we haven’t begun to root out all of the problem, all of the bad behavior. But what we do have today is people talking and calling it out—and you have a much better understanding, culturally, of what the problem is, and the very existence of a problem. Now it’s time to find the solution. Not just one here and one there, assuming that fixes the problem, but solutions that can be systematized and institutionalized, approaches that can really change our lives on a larger scale. That comes from a very high level—somebody has to drive that.
I was working on a session at Brandeis about labor issues: In particular, the topic of high unemployment rate and low wages for the African American male. I asked a question to the speaker, who happened to be Senator Ted Kennedy: What does it take for our government to actually acknowledge that and address it as a priority issue? And he said: It takes a Secretary of Labor who, every morning, gets up and thinks, ‘What can I do to bridge the disparity in employment and in pay for people of color?’ Something they think about every day, and they work on every day.
I would love to have leadership in Washington, in any cabinet position—in all of the cabinet positions would be ideal—looking at the issue of gender-based violence, every day, and how to address it. My feeling is that we will demand that someone rise up to the occasion—not only the people who are experiencing the problem, but the people who live in society and who witness them.
Is there anyone you wish you could give your book to in particular, for the knowledge in it to seep into them?
Well, I’d like to hand it to everyone who holds a cabinet position, for them to look at how their area is being impacted. And I can tell you, whether it’s housing, or the Justice Department, or Labor, or Health and Human Services, the military—every one of the leaders has an interest in eliminating this problem.
I do hope people will read it and look at it as a way to understand how we got to where we are… and a way to move forward, that will allow us to say, This is the generation where we really turned the corner and the world will be safer for our children and grandchildren because of what we’re doing today.
That’s a fair, if still lofty, expectation.
I feel more hopeful, because people are acting because of what they’ve read. If we look at it from the point of view of: This is on us, and we can do something in our own world—even if we don’t own a corporation or work for the Secretary of Defense—we can move things.
It’s important to remain proactive. But yeah, sometimes it feels like too much defeat, and that’s hard to bear.
It feels hard because it is hard! But it’s not impossible. It’s not impossible. And on a personal note, let me tell you: 30 years ago, when I testified, I was told by people from the press—one reporter in particular—In a month or two, nobody’s gonna even remember your name. Nobody’s gonna care.
Oh WOW.
Maybe they don’t care about me! But people now care about this issue.
Yeah, that is just such an absurdly huge misfire on every level. It’s actually funny, in a perverse way.
Part of my inspiration is to make sure that person is wrong [laughs].
