In her new book, the renowned professor of law and social policy utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to address issues of race, gender, class and access to the American dream.
At lectures around the country where Anita Hill discusses the subject explored in her most recent book, Reimagining Equality: Gender, Race, and the American Dream, there is a palpable sense of excitement and energy among those in attendance. Audience members connect Hill’s history to their own moments of enlightenment, engagement in issues and sense of purpose.
Hill’s book is about the role home plays in defining equality. Home in many cases is defined by the purchase of real property and the rewards and challenges that come with such a purchase, but Hill indicates it also means a sense of community and belonging. She talks about how the foreclosure crisis brings to light issues of inequality in terms of race and gender.
On Monday evening, Hill addressed a capacity audience at Barnard College at the 2012 Helen Rodgers Reid Lecture, a series begun in 1975 to honor distinguished women in public life who have shown significant commitment to improving the lives of all women. Her presentation included aspects of her family’s story, which had been largely gathered through oral history, as well as points related to sociology, economics, psychology, law, public policy and social justice.
“Interdisciplinarity is about the ways in which we marshal different kinds of methodologies in order to address different kinds of problems,” said Dr. Tina Campt, director of Barnard’s Africana Studies program and professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. “There’s a necessity from the perspective of Africana Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies—those kinds of interdisciplinary programs—not to just approach a problem or a social issue from a single perspective … but to be able to mobilize a number of different methodologies to actually be able to crack into that problem.
“What I felt she did really masterfully is to point to the way that politically it’s really essential that we draw not simply on policy analysis and demographic analysis, but also on the various kinds of resources that different communities have both historically and in terms of their own survival strategies used to face the structural inequalities that are still sort of hardwired into American society for people of color and for minority groups.
“Social justice cannot be achieved simply through the law,” she added. “You have to mobilize all sorts of different approaches in order to accomplish the complicated project that is social equality.”
