To be clear, the following is not — is not a book review.

     A useful aspect of Anita Hill's Believing Our Thifty-Year To End Gender-Violence is the catalogue of legal episodes concerning harassment and bullying which have occurred within the last said time span of the United States. Hill does not limit her discussion with explicit examples of sexual harassment but includes various instances of bullying, school shootings, and, more broad, gender based violence, or gender violence. The distinction she never made clear in her book. Only from a Zoom interview she gives does one gain any clue that bullying, sexual harassment, and gender violence are distinct and overlap.

     Definitions are useful and needful at the beginning. Hill does give the legal definition for sexual harassment but she never proffers any explicit definition for what is gender violence and it's difference from gender-based violence (hyphen sometimes and sometimes not included . . . bad editing?). What Hill lacks in lucidity with the causal and fluid swapping between the three terms, sexual harassment, gender violence, and gender-based violence, she makes up for in her compelling narratives that rehearse the emotional and legal fallout from such episodes of either three occurrences.

     Another problem I have is with Hill's selective examples. Fair enough highlighting her direct involvement with the major episode in American history in relations to the Thomas confirmation hearings. A chance at telling her side is to be expected and accepted. But Hill's gloss review on Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions and harassment pales in comparison to her exhaustive recounting of the Christine Blasey Ford's campaign against, then, candidate for SCotUS justice Brett Kavanaugh. No denying the parallels between Ford and Hill, to be sure, but Anita Hill's repeated highlighting bad behavior examples of the more politically-right leaning figures e.g. painting Mitt Romney as some American version of Flashman while ignoring examples from across the political aisle taints the creditability of her objectivity or analysis, or at the very least, makes her suspect as to underlying motives in continuing a campaign that conspicuously ignore personalities who committed similar egregious acts whose politically leanings advocate or represent decidedly not of the Conservative persuasion.

     Leaving aside the issues I have with Ibram X. Kendi's fallacious rendering of racism, Hill adopts . . ., mimics Kendi by coining her solution to the sexual harassment / gender violence / gender-based violence as needing an anti-gender-based violence approach. Here she is unclear. Hill does not elaborate on what she means or envisions. Granted, one is wanting to avoid positing some utopian scheme; however, if she is going to suggest any solution, or any approach toward some solution, at all, then a concrete prescription is warranted, even if only as an optimistic flight of fancy. Pose a solution and not say, "well, . . . I like what this guy did with that word, let me coin a copy of what he did."

For posterity, let me share my submitted question to a talk by Anita Hill for my local public library where questions were invited via emailing the librarian host of the event.