Anita Hill deserves a real apology. Why couldn't Joe Biden offer one?

Joe Biden’s long-awaited presidential announcement finally came on Thursday, in the form of a policy-free video in which the former vice-president castigated Donald Trump for his racism and offered peans to an imagined noble American past (presumably, the past of 2008-16, when Biden served under Barack Obama) instead of a vision for the future.

“America’s coming back like we used to be,” Biden said of his run. “Ethical, straight, tell ’em the truth. Supporting our allies, all those good things.” It was Make America Great Again, delivered from a different old white man, with a slightly more patrician east coast accent – harking back to a past that never was, and ignoring or, perhaps, tacitly embracing the injustices that the real past contained.

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Several of those injustices have been perpetrated by Biden himself, or exacerbated by his career in the Senate, in which he worked steadily to push the Democratic party to the right, championed the 1994 crime bill that needlessly and sadistically accelerated mass incarceration, and cultivated a chummy, shoulder-clapping consensus with Republicans.

Among those injustices were the 1991 confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, now one of the most fiercely conservative justices on the supreme court. As chair of the Senate judiciary committee, Biden led the hearings into accusations of gross sexual harassment by Thomas that had been unearthed from Anita Hill, a lawyer who had once been Thomas’ employee at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Under Biden’s leadership, the committee subjected Hill to a humiliating public ordeal in which she was belittled, condescended to, smeared and disbelieved.

It was a spectacle of cruelty in which Biden and his all-male committee colleagues confirmed the dark suspicions of many American woman, on live TV: that men could harass and humiliate them with impunity. Hill was harangued in the press, which concocted a bizarre and evidence-free theory, encouraged by Republicans, that she had invented her accusations against Thomas because she was sexually obsessed with him. Biden and his cohort confirmed Thomas anyway.

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Hill, now a law professor at Brandeis, revealed that Biden contacted her last month. She “declined to characterize his words to her as an apology”.

In the past, Biden, under pressure from women’s rights activists and a Democratic base increasingly intolerant of sexual misconduct, has spoken of the Thomas hearings in passive terms, as something that happened rather than as something he did. At an event in New York in March, he said: “To this day, I regret I couldn’t give her the kind of hearing she deserved. I wish I could have done something.” Like his announcement, this statement partakes of a kind of rosy historical revisionism, one that conveniently absolved Biden of all responsibility. Because he absolutely could have, in his words, “done something”. He was the chairman of the committee overseeing the hearings. There was no one with more power to “do something” than him.

Biden’s non-apology to Hill, coming as it did 28 years after the disastrous hearings, six months after a similarly humiliating and futile ordeal was endured by Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, and mere days before Biden’s own presidential run, smacks of insincere opportunism. He seems to understand Hill as an annoying obstacle to his own rise, rather than as a full person with rights and dignity, whom he wronged and should make amends to.

His insistent use of the passive voice, meanwhile, makes him appear to lack an understanding of his own agency and power, like someone who will exaggerate his responsibilities for successes and disavow any role in missteps, wrongdoings and failures. As the journalist Bryce Covert put it: “There’s a huge difference between ‘I’m sorry for what I did’, and ‘I’m sorry that happened to you’.” In failing to grapple with his own blind spots, privileges, prejudices and personal failures, Biden has betrayed a lack of personal responsibility that in unacceptable in any adult, let alone in a national leader. The episode does not make Biden seem like a responsible, self-aware man who had learned from his mistakes and wants to make amends. It makes him seem like a man who wants to shut a woman up.

To her credit, Hill has not taken the bait. Where a person of less fortitude would have understandably wanted to put the hearings behind them, Hill has been unwavering in her insistence that the way she was treated was wrong and unwilling to compromise in her search for real justice. “I cannot be satisfied by [him] simply saying, ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you,’” she told the New York Times. “I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose.”

It’s the same demand she’s had for years: not for a simple acknowledgement that she has suffered, but for a way to ensure that other women don’t have to suffer the same way. “Rather than expect an apology, which in political terms is a pretty easy act to do,” she told the writer Irin Carmon in 2014, “I would like for us to improve our processes, and ensure that we do not allow this to happen ever again.”

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist