Justice & Law Quote by Anita Hill

Hill is doing something braver than pointing out hypocrisy: she is insisting that the judiciary's legitimacy is not a given, it is earned, and it has been historically squandered. The opening clause, "We have a history", refuses the comforting myth that bias is an aberration or a few bad apples. It frames discrimination as institutional memory - baked into hiring, promotion, credibility, and whose pain registers as "reasonable". That "continues" is the knife twist: past injustice isn't past if its patterns still shape outcomes.

The phrase "on our court" matters too. It's possessive and civic, pulling the audience out of spectator mode. This isn't someone else's broken system; it's a public instrument we all authorize. Hill is also signaling a core reality of legal power: courts don't just interpret society, they curate it. Who gets to sit on the bench, and who is imagined as a neutral arbiter, becomes policy by another name.

Then she tightens the argument with a moral inversion: exclusion "based on race" isn't merely unfair to the excluded; it's "antagonistic" to justice itself. That's a deliberate escalation beyond diversity-as-optics. She's rejecting the idea that a court can pursue justice while practicing racial gatekeeping, as if impartiality can be performed on top of structural bias. The subtext is a warning: when the system keeps replicating a narrow demographic of authority, it teaches the public that justice is selective - and once people believe that, the law's power starts to look like coercion dressed up as procedure.

Contextually, this lands in a post-civil rights, post-affirmative action backlash era, where "neutrality" is often used to defend old hierarchies. Hill cuts through that with a blunt premise: neutrality that preserves exclusion is not neutrality.