Dispatch #92 White Lesbian Age 69 Considers The Courage and Resistance of Anita Hill and Winona LaDuke

March 16th 2022

419 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

676 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

Warrior Women do know how to actually speak truth to power. Their examples set the bar for language that dismantles the patriarchy’s misogynistic narrative and exposes the toxic roots. These women urge us to keep our resistance alive.

Rebecca Traister’s conversation with Anita Hill about Hill’s memoir Believing (Penguin Random House September 2021) appeared in New York Magazine with this title: “Anita Hill Wants More Than an Apology: Thirty years after her groundbreaking testimony to Congress, Hill says gender violence is a public crisis.”  https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/09/anita-hill-clarence-thomas-joe-biden.html

In conversation with Traister – she is always incisive and out-raging -- Hill describes how she came to understand gender as inextricably intertwined with race in the struggle for civil rights in the US.   

Traister: Your book is explicit about the interlocking forces of racism and misogyny and how you just can’t pull apart any of these biases. You also write about the harm done by our carceral system and policing — that purported solutions to gender violence are themselves part of the problem of gender violence. So how do you find a path forward when the solutions on the table — including policing and incarceration — are themselves wholly inseparable from the problem?

Hill: Well, first of all, if you reveal all that, and are open about it, what it does is keep us from pitting Black women’s freedom and safety against Black men’s. You make clear that the real core enemy is the system that devalues both of us, and the system is winning in that fight.

One of the things I hear very often from young women of color is, How do I come forward against a person who is abusing me if he’s a person of my own race and I will be accused of shaming the community, and putting someone in harm’s way via the police? I hear from young Black men who say, “I want to be a part of the movement to end violence against women.” Maybe it’s because of the people in their own family, maybe it’s violence that they have experienced themselves because of their gender or gender identity or sexual identity. The question really is how do you bring those two together and help them to understand that you fight both racism and patriarchy at the same time? 

Traister: And you think it’s within the purview of the president to make some of these changes?

Hill: It is a responsibility of the president to deal with issues that are this vast, this systemic, this harmful, that keep getting passed on from generation to generation and that fall on the most vulnerable people in our society. When I look at gender-based violence, I see the pervasiveness of it, the variety of the harm, how it’s damaging our institutions, including our military….We need a president who is willing to call out gender violence as a public crisis — not a personal problem. It’s not a private issue. This is a public crisis and it demands structural change. 

Winona LaDuke (Mississippi Band Anishinaabe Indians of the White Earth reservation in Minnesota) is an internationally respected activist renowned for her visionary and progressive work on tribal land claims, sustainable development and food systems.  

In conversation with New York Times reporter David Marchese, LaDuke discusses how President Biden has betrayed native people by allowing construction of tar-sands pipeline. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/09/magazine/winona-laduke-interview.html  

Biden’s hellbent on destroying Ojibwe people with this pipeline. Why do we get the last tar-sands pipeline, Joe? It’s kind of like when John Kerry went and testified to Congress against the Vietnam War and said, Who’s going to tell that soldier that he’s the last one to die for a bad war? Who’s going to tell those Ojibwes that they’re the last ones to be destroyed for a bad tar-sands pipeline? What’s right about this? I organized people to vote for Biden. I drove people to the polls through seas of Trump signs. I drove Indian people to vote who hadn’t voted in 20 years. And what did we get from Joe? A pipeline shoved down our throats…No. He [Biden] doesn’t have animosity, but he’s privileging a Canadian multinational. 

The dispossession and genocide of Indigenous people is central to the issues of critical race theory. Indians are arrested much more than non-Indians. Our incarceration is longer. Same thing if you’re looking at police brutality: We have higher rates of death in custody than others. Everything about being oppressed, we got ’er. So we see a clear alliance with Black Lives Matter….Indian-hating is about these people living on stolen land. To justify the theft of land you have to make us less. That’s the dehumanization that we have been facing. Our land is held by federal, state and county governments and large non-Indian landowners. Indian-hating is a practice of the Deep North [i.e., states such as Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Montana].

What I want is, I want white people to quit being white people. White is a social construct. I want them to know who the hell they are, and I want them to be not a patriot to a flag but a patriot to a land. That’s what I want. The transience of white people has put us in this situation where they don’t even know who they are, where they come from; the idea that I’m just going to keep moving to greener pastures. What happened to community and place? I want people to find something and take care of it. I want them to let go of their white privilege and be good humans.

After more than four decades of activism and resistance, LaDuke’s narrative continues to be plainspoken, powerful and unapologetic.  Anita Hill, in response to Traister’s comment about maintaining optimism 30 years post-Clarence Thomas, offers this reflection:

I have been thinking a lot about [the late activist and lawyer] Pauli Murray. She says, “Hope is a song in a weary throat.” And I’ve always described myself as hopeful. I guess what it comes down to is whether your emphasis is on the song or the weary throat. And mine is on the song. I may have a weary throat, but I also have a song.