Anita Hill empathizes with ‘irritatingly familiar’ insults against Harris in op-ed

Anita Hill, former clerk to US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has said “racist, misogynist and sexist insults” aimed at Kamala Harris “must sting”.

In a New York Times opinion piece published Monday, the Brandeis University professor who was famously brought before Thomas’s confirmation hearings only to have her sexual harassment allegations against him picked apart by sitting senators, wrote that she sympathizes with the US vice-president.

“Maintaining integrity in politics can be a hard needle to thread,” Hill acknowledged, and advised Harris to “defend herself against the assaults and also vigorously prosecute the case against Mr Trump”.

But she said it is “not easy to remain calm and collected in the glare of intense public scrutiny, especially when the opposition is set on denying your integrity, competence and accomplishments”.

“No presidential nominees in modern history have faced such a direct challenge to the authenticity of their identity and by extension their qualifications to be the president,” she added.

Hill said that interruptions by Fox News’s anchor Bret Baier during his recent interview with Harris was “irritatingly familiar”, though Baier later explained these were efforts to “redirect” the Democrat presidential candidate because otherwise her “long answers” would “eat up all the time of this interview that was live-to-tape”.

Donald Trump has viciously attacked Harris repeatedly, including questioning her racial identity. Harris is the daughter of an Indian American and a Jamaican American and has embraced both her Black and south Asian heritage.

Thomas’ former clerk went on to advise Harris to “never let the people who despise you define you” and wrote that Harris should not allow herself to be influenced by other people’s perceptions of her.

“Her refusal to be thrown on the defensive by personal attacks – Ms Harris is showing people how to protect and nurture their own self-worth,” she wrote, noting that “hubris, dissembling, anger, fear mongering and personal grievances are brandished and accepted as proof of power, confidence and competence” in politics.

But her central call was for Harris to restore respect for the US legal system in a way that makes clear “we have moved beyond the historical understandings that freedom, rights and liberty are limited to the powerful and rich”.

Irrespective of the result of next week’s election, Hill said, the vice-president “has already introduced an American political future that promises a recognition of human dignity as its bedrock”.