Reimagining Equality: Stories of Race, Gender and Home, is the title of Anita Hill’s new book. She was recently interviewed on NPR and commented on one of the obstacles preventing equality of opportunity in the US. This seems timely as the hiring season is upon us:
“I do think that just in general, people are comfortable with people who look like them or they believe think like them. And I think we have a lot to do in terms of really giving people full opportunity in employment, whether … you think of them as safe or not. I think full opportunity in employment just does not exist today in the way that maybe I thought it would have when I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. I really thought some of these battles and some of these issues would have been resolved by now.
“And I really aggressively titled my book Reimagining Equality because that’s a process that I’m having to go through, like: What is equality like today? How can we envision it in terms of the way people live every day as opposed to the abstract rights that we say that everybody has and that, you know, we can go to court to enforce?”
I haven’t read the book, but it seems an interesting project to try to conceptualize what we do have in the way of equality, and what we do not, which may be what she is doing.
Two interesting comments on Amazon’s website; I take it these were blurbs for the book:
“In a book that is rigorous and heartfelt, sharply analytical and deeply moving, Anita Hill examines the idea of what ‘home’ means to Americans. Bringing to bear her formidable skills as a scholar of American law, history, and culture, Hill has produced a personal narrative that reaches across color and class to explore how our family homes and our national home are inextricably linked to how we understand achievement, opportunity, and equality.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“In her new book, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Race, Gender, and Finding Home, Professor Anita Hill has written a sobering and compelling book about the plight of woman historically and now. This book is a must read for anyone who is committed to gender equality, and will be invaluable to those who are trying to understand many of the burdens that women, black and white face, in their everyday lives. An easy read, this book has both tragic and triumphant stories and covers the life of women through slavery, and those who now live in the Obama era. They remind us that we still have to come to grips with issues of race and gender, and that we need to re-imagine the question of equality for all. I recommend it with great enthusiasm and excitement about its value to a large audience of readers.”—Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr., author of The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America
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