Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
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 September 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 conversations 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.