“How does it feel to know that you’ve changed the world?” This is a question that a high school student asked Anita Hill about a decade ago when she went to speak at a vo-tech high school.
Speaking to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, Hill said she didn’t have much of a response for the young man who stood in front of a microphone in the cafeteria and asked her that question.
In 1991, Anita Hill testified before Congress about the sexual harassment she allegedly experienced while working as an aide to Clarence Thomas, who was a Supreme Court nominee.
Until that moment in the cafeteria, Hill says it hadn’t really dawned on her what her testimony meant. “What it did for me was to make me act as though I could change the world. That inspired me because someone that age to have that perspective and I realised in a real way who I was changing the world for,” Hill told Colbert.
At the time of her testimony, Hill — who’s a professor of law and gender studies — thought she’d be able to resume her life and that everything would go back to normal. “My life was turned upside down, it was completely turned upside down. It was chaos and turmoil and threats, threats to my job and threats to just about every aspect of my life. But, I hung in there,” she said.
“One of the things that helped me hang in there was what I kept hearing from people who had been suffering from a form of gender violence, one of the other, whether it was incest or bullying or sexual harassment or rape or sexual assault — all of above. It gave people courage and hope.”
