Do you think this is sufficient to make a difference in the November elections? Jackson, particularly places like Kansas. We’ve been reading recently about waves of voter registration in the wake of Dobbs v. I have a deep sense that some of the women who came forward only ever wanted one thing: an adjudicatory process in which the federal judiciary simply examined their claims and made a finding so that we could all say “this happened.” And the utter absence of that, both for Kozinski and later for Kavanaugh is one of the lasting enduring failings, both of the federal judiciary, but also of the #MeToo system generally. And so my chapter was a reflection on kind of complicity, in which I allowed myself to sit next to him at panels and go to events with him. I had told friends, it was an open secret and yet I had kept the secret for decades. I found myself in this horrible position of having known this all along as a journalist and as a former law clerk and never, ever reported it. One woman after another, after another came forward to say he had horrifically either kind of abused them in the workplace or had showed them porn or talked explicitly about sex to them. He is a phenomenal, brilliant thinker and writer, and he said things no one dared to say. He is the former chief judge of the ninth circuit. But with Alex Kozinski there’s a personal connection. Your chapter on #MeToo takes on a figure who is very logical, but much less known than Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby. I will say they named a residential college at Yale after Pauli Murray a few years ago I’m not sure even the students who live there know what this person accomplished in their life. She only finds out years later that she was really the architect of some of the stuff that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was later doing in her gender litigation. She wrote a paper that without her knowledge or consent becomes the spine of Brown v. She was desegregating lunch counters long before it was cool in the civil rights movement. She sat at the front of a bus and refused to move long before Rosa Parks did it. And yet history almost entirely papered over her. She was kind of the Where’s Waldo of the modern racial and gender justice movements. She was everywhere. Murray strongly believed she was a boy born into a girl’s body. Who was she? Why did you start the book with her?įirst, I would note that if Pauli Murray were alive today, they might want to be called they. I’m going to guess that most people have never heard of her. We have so much magical thinking about equality and these legal protections that when they’re taken away we’re like: how could this have happened? And the last thing I would say on false consciousness is that my real obsession has been these black women scholars, including Pauli Murray, who starts the book, Peggy Cooper Davis, and Dorothy Roberts, who’ve been writing for decades and decades that what you and I are seeing now is the lived experience of black women throughout history. That’s I think the false consciousness you’re describing. Then Dobbs was argued and it was manifest that Roe was going to get overturned, and then July comes and everybody’s shocked that it’s overturned. One of my obsessions this past year after Texas passed the vigilante abortion bill and the Supreme Court was just like, cool, cool, cool. Should we think about it as a kind of false consciousness-that there’s an illusion of equality but actually we need the Constitution to be more rigorously enforced in order to create that equality? Or is it impossible to undo the injustices that were in the early Constitution? I guess you’re screwed.” So I guess what I’m saying is it’s a special relationship because it’s everywhere and nowhere. But in fact, we’re subject to a history that is so freighted with inequality, that it’s just very easy with the stroke of a pen for Justice Alito to just say, “Look, the word abortion isn’t in the Constitution. I’m very, very interested in the illusion that women have all the power that the entire legal system and constitutional system brings us to this moment where we’re equal. We have equal pay, we have power, if we don’t like it, we can vote. And then to be vaulted into this present consciousness where we all think everything works, we’re equal. Dahlia Lithwick: I was thinking in terms of women and the law: What does it mean to be emphatically in a system that controls everything you do, but that system for the longest time gave you no voice and no power? In fact, you were chattel and property.
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