Talking to Anita Hill | 'All These Issues Are Still With Us'

By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Magazine

23 March 14

t’s fair to say that the target audience for the new documentary Anita, which opens Friday in theaters, is not Ginni Thomas.

One of the ways we know this is that the movie, about Anita Hill, opens with the audio of Mrs. Thomas’ bizarre 2010 voice mail message, asking professor Hill to “consider an apology and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought. I certainly pray about this and hope one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. OK! Have a good day!"

It’s pretty clear that Frieda Lee Mock, the director, isn’t trying to win over the “little bit slutty and a little bit nutty” crowd, which still maintains that Hill was a deranged fabulist and attention seeker when she testified to Congress that Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee, sexually harassed her when he was her boss. As far as Mock is concerned, Anita Hill was truthful back when she was 35, and Anita Hill is truthful now at 57. The only story to tell is how she has fared since the infamous 1991 confirmation hearings that made her a household name. Through the voices of longtime friends, corroborating witnesses, plus Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, whose 1994 book, Strange Justice, bolstered Hill’s claims, what emerges in Anita is the closing argument the Senate never heard.

Hill has been on something of a media tear this month, promoting the film on The Daily Show, The View, MSNBC, and in several online chats. Hill knows that her name is familiar to those of us who were old enough to be paying attention back in the early ’90s. And she knows she won’t be changing the minds of Thomas partisans. Her target demographic is young people.

I spoke to her yesterday about why she was willing to dredge up that awful fall of 1991, and step back into a spotlight that had been anything but kind to her. In the intervening years, she has received death threats, bomb threats, threats of sexual violence, and a sustained campaign to have her fired from her first teaching job in Oklahoma. All that plus a 7:30 a.m. call from Ginni Thomas. This has been her life. She hadn’t planned on any of it.

In the film Hill says that she once believed she could devote just two years, post-confirmation hearings, to sexual harassment law, and then return to her pet subjects: “Initially,” she tells me, “I thought I would just go back and do what I do: commercial law and contracts. But within months I was getting so many requests that it just felt that there was a sincere effort for people to understand sexual harassment. It took a lot of letters from people who were asking really sincere questions, and so I gave it two years. And 23 years later … I say to people I do know how to count. There just seem to be so many layers to the problem that we’re still trying to address them.”

Almost every recent interview with Hill begins with an interlocutor observing, in great amazement, that 23 years have elapsed since the hearing. I ask whether that’s because it feels like it’s been longer, or because it feels so recent. She laughs: “Isn’t that odd, though? I think that both are going on. I mean, you look at that panel of men in the Senate and it’s 1991 and yet it looks like 50 or 60 years ago. And yet at the same time, when people look at the footage and they see me, they think, “Was that all? Could it have been 23 years ago? Because all these issues are still with us.”

Are they still with us? Heck yes. “Look at the mayor of San Diego, or look at Jonathan Martin,” says Hill, referring to alleged serial harasser Bob Filner, now resigned, and the NFL player who was tormented on the job. “These episodes just keep coming up over and over again. We know that in 1991 we started to really understand and to take it seriously. But I think in 2014 we have an opportunity to take it seriously for the young women who are on campuses, and the young women who are in the military. And for the women in workplaces that have not gone addressed.”

We forget that sexual harassment law almost didn’t exist 30 years ago. And yet in some ways we are still such a pack of brutalizing harassers. How is it possible that all these years later, after Sen. Howell Heflin of Alabama, a Democrat, first called Hill a “scorned woman” and Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a Republican, referred to all that “sexual harassment crap,” we still have Sandra Fluke? Doesn’t that depress Anita Hill? It depresses me. Do we treat women any better than we did 20 years ago, in the workplace or in public discourse about the workplace?

Hill says there is a difference today: “What I am hoping,” she says, “is that this movie will shed a light on the process of 1991 and people can ask themselves, are our processes any better today? Are our policies more responsive today? And I think they clearly are better because I hear from a lot of women that after 1991 it wasn’t just that women started to file complaints, but they went into their employment arenas and said, ‘This has got to change, we’ve got to let people know what their rights are, we have to stop the culture of our workplaces that support and suborn these behaviors.’ … There is still work to be done. It took a lot of very brave women for us to get here. People say, ‘I thought we’d already fixed that problem.’ No. But we’ve acknowledged it.”

And that’s the most brutal part of the film: reliving the complete and systemic failure to acknowledge what Hill was saying, the failure to take her seriously, the failure to call her corroborating witnesses. In the end, Joe Biden, then-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and the Democrats who failed her come out looking almost as bad as the Republicans who call her names. One of the most crazy-making aspects of the film is that we are forced to watch 14 white male United States senators persistently refuse to make eye contact with Hill—their eyes roll around the room like Cookie Monster’s—while they grill her for almost nine hours on the lurid details of penis length, large breasts, Long Dong Silver, and the pubic hair in the Coke can. Over and over, each thinking he is the Perry Mason of Porn. Yet Hill answers, repeatedly, politely, clarifying and explaining that she is not making a formal sexual harassment claim; that she didn’t ask to come forward and testify. She never loses it, even when the viewer desperately wants her to.

It’s not until we arrive at Clarence Thomas’ “high-tech lynching” speech that the room stills. The proceeding is completely under Thomas’ control. The hearing is effectively over. “I had a gender and he had a race,” says Hill at one point in the film. I ask her what that means. “There were people who tried to ignore the fact that I was an African-American woman, and very importantly, there were senators and the people in the country who ignored the fact that in Washington, D.C., particularly in 1991, there was a great deal of entitlement that went along with being a male. … They didn’t take that it into account and instead they portrayed him as an African-American who could use the lynching metaphor to his advantage.”   

I ask Hill how it felt to bite back her own anger while Thomas gave full vent to his. “I don’t use my anger as a strategy,” she replies. “And I think that’s what he was doing. That was a strategy. I don’t even know how real it was.” She adds: “Of course I get angry. I have processed all of the emotions: hurt, anger, outrage, bewilderment that this could be happening, denying that this could happen. ... Maybe all those different phases of grief. And I do tend to process it privately. That is the nature of who I am. Even if I am seen as a public figure, I can’t put everything out there because people want to see it.

“Being who we are is the only way to effectively convey the truth of our experiences. And processes ought to allow for that,” Hill says. She recalls how, in the movie, Arizona Sen. Dennis DeConcini, a Democrat, says something to the effect of “ ‘well, when women are harassed, they oughta do this and they oughta do that and they oughta get angry and they oughta raise hell.’ But people can’t tell us how we respond to our own problems. They shouldn’t say ‘because she didn’t act the way I would have acted, it must not be true.’ ” She laughs: “You’re supposed to bang on the table! But had I done what DeConcini said, then I would have been caricatured in a different way.”

Hill doesn’t just want to teach young people a (recent) history lesson. She wants them to see, too, how things have turned out just fine for her. The second half of Anita shows Hill in her new life, teaching law at Brandeis, in a long-term relationship, love-bombed by family, and surrounded by young women seeking to learn from her experience. The fact that so few young people have heard of her is staggering. (The trailer opens with a teacher asking a class full of young women if they have heard of Anita Hill. They blink at her.) It’s especially galling in light of what she represented. The change in the numbers of women in government can be at least partially attributed to the hearings. (In 1991 there were two women in the Senate. In 1992, “the year of the woman,” female politicians enraged by the hearings won four new Senate seats and 24 new House seats.) Hill’s testimony had a huge impact on sexual harassment law, and in the public discourse. Watching the movie Anita made me very angry, but talking to the person Anita gave me some hope that the next generation of women, many of whom don’t even know her name, will be fully visible in the eyes of the law, in part because of her ordeal.

Another Stolen Generation: How Australia Still Wrecks Aboriginal Families

By John Pilger, Guardian UK

23 March 14

The mass removal of Indigenous children from their parents continues unabated – where is the outrage?

he tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, "There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would've been hung years ago, wouldn't I? Because [as an Aboriginal Australian] you're guilty before you're found innocent." The child's grandmother demands to know why "the stealing of our kids is happening all over again". A welfare official says, "I'm gunna take him, mate."

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognised abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous stolen generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.

Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as "breeding out the colour", the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997 a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured "the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation ... the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state". The report called this genocide.

Assimilation remains Australian government policy in all but name. Euphemisms such as "reconciliation" and "Stronger Futures" cover similar social engineering and an enduring, insidious racism in the political elite, the bureaucracy and wider Australian society. When in 2008 prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised for the stolen generation, he added: "I want to be blunt about this. There will be no compensation." The Sydney Morning Herald congratulated Rudd on a "shrewd manoeuvre" that "cleared away a piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters' emotional needs, yet changes nothing".

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been "removed". This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3% of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.

Pat (not her real name) is the mother whose anguish was secretly recorded on a phone as four department of child services officials, and six police, descended on her home. On the tape an official claims they have come only for an "assessment". But two of the police officers, who knew Pat, told her they saw no risk to her child and warned her to "get out of here quick". Pat fled, cradling her infant, but the one-year-old was eventually seized without her knowing why. The next morning a police officer returned to apologise to her and said her baby should never have been taken away. Pat has no idea where her son is.

Once she was "invited" by officials to bring her children to "neutral" offices to discuss a "care plan". The doors were locked and officials seized the children, with one of the youngest dragging on a police officer's gun belt. Many Indigenous mothers are unaware of their legal rights. A secretive children's court has become notorious for rubber-stamping removals.

Most Aboriginal families live on the edge. Their life expectancy in towns a short flight from Sydney is as low as 37. Dickensian diseases are rife; Australia is the only developed country not to have eradicated trachoma, which blinds Aboriginal children.

Pat has both complied with and struggled bravely against a punitive bureaucracy that can remove children on hearsay. She has twice been acquitted of false charges, including "kidnapping" her own children. A psychologist has described her as a capable and good mother.

Josie Crawshaw, the former director of a respected families' support organisation in Darwin, told me: "In remote areas, officials will go in with a plane in the early hours and fly the child thousands of kilometres from their community. There'll be no explanation, no support, and the child may be gone forever."

In 2012 the co-ordinator general of remote services for the Northern Territory, Olga Havnen, was sacked when she revealed that almost A$80m (£44m) was spent on the surveillance and removal of Aboriginal children compared with only A$500,000 (£275,000) on supporting the same impoverished families. She told me: "The primary reasons for removing children are welfare issues directly related to poverty and inequality. The impact is just horrendous because if they are not reunited within six months, it's likely they won't see each other again. If South Africa was doing this, there'd be an international outcry."

She and others with long experience I have interviewed have echoed the Bringing them Home report, which described an official "attitude" in Australia that regarded all Aboriginal people as "morally deficient". A department of family and community services spokesman said that most removed Indigenous children in New South Wales were placed with Indigenous carers. According to Indigenous support networks, this is a smokescreen; it does not mean families, and it is control by divisiveness that is the bureaucracy's real achievement.

I met a group of Aboriginal grandmothers, all survivors of the first stolen generation, all now with stolen grandchildren. "We live in a state of fear, again," they said. David Shoebridge, a state Greens MP, told me: "The truth is, there is a market among whites for these kids, especially babies."

The New South Wales parliament is soon to debate legislation that introduces forced adoption and "guardianship". Children under two years old will be liable – without the mother's consent – if "removed" for more than six months. For many Aboriginal mothers like Pat, it can take six months merely to make contact with their children. "It's setting up Aboriginal families to fail," said Shoebridge.

I asked Josie Crawshaw why. "The wilful ignorance in Australia about its first people has now become the kind of intolerance that gets to the point where you can smash an entire group of humanity and there is no fuss."