Anita Hill still waits for change, 30 years after testimony

America had yet to really learn about sexual harassment when Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas in front of an all-male Senate panel in October 1991

America had yet to really understand sexual harassment when Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas in front of an all-male Senate panel in October 1991. He was confirmed to the Supreme Court anyway, but Hill’s work was just beginning.

Now, three decades later, what does 65-year-old Hill wish she could have told 35-year-old Hill, the young professor in the bright blue suit who testified calmly and deliberately that day but had utterly no idea what lay ahead?

“I wish I had known then that the work would take a long time,” she says now. “That I should be patient — diligent, but patient.” As a lawyer, she had thought institutions would do their job, she says. “What I wasn’t understanding was our culture of denial.”

It’s safe to say the soft-spoken Hill, an exceedingly private person who has spent her entire adult life in the classroom, didn’t grow up planning to become an activist. But the Thomas hearings set her on a different path, and when the #MeToo reckoning exploded in 2017, she was automatically a potent symbol. She still teaches gender, race and law at Brandeis University and also chairs the Hollywood Commission, which fights harassment in the entertainment industry, along with other advocacy work.