Volume 1, No. 7 (October, 1991), pp. 104-106
THE ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS by Patricia J. Williams.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. 263 pp. Cloth $24.95
Reviewed by Kenneth A. Betsalel, University of North Carolina at
Asheville Patricia J. Williams has written an important book that
should be read by all those seeking to understand subjective ways
of knowing the world and the ways in which legal and personal
identities are formed. Williams, who now teaches law and women's
studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has also
taught at Stanford University Law School and the City University
of New York.
Through the use of anecdotes (which can be considered the book's
primary data) and analysis of contemporary events (mostly culled
from THE NEW YORK TIMES), this highly personal, almost
confessional work portrays Williams' encounters with such pub-
lic/private issues (a distinction Williams wants to self- con-
sciously blur) as life in the academy, affirmative action,
surrogate motherhood, racial violence, and truth telling in
academic research. Nearly all of Williams' narratives are linked
to her concern with race relations in the United States and the
apparent failure of the nation to come to terms with its past.
The strength of this book (and what might also be considered its
major flaw) revolves around the question of method. Paulo Freire
has written in THE PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED that to negate the
centrality of subjectivity in human understanding is "naive
and simplistic" and is but a vain attempt to deny the
importance of people in the making of their own history.
The problem with Williams' book is not that she is subjec- tive,
but that her subjectivity is occasionally misplaced. By this I
mean Williams sometimes uses subjective forms of discourse and
evaluation (a epistemology of knowledge that emphasizes personal
interpretation and meaning) to make points and win arguments
rather than as a method to explore what she fully recognizes is a
complex, often paradoxical, even tragic reality. In effect,
Williams uses what she at one point refers to as her
"subject position" (p.3) to create straw men, dare I
say "fic- tions," in order to display her considerable
brilliance as a social critic.
For example, Williams insufficiently develops evidence to
question Stanford University's handling of the Ujaama House
incident (a case in which a student maliciously defaced a poster
of Beethoven in order to ridicule the idea that Beethoven could
possibly have African ancestry) or to claim her colleagues' exams
(one of which made use of a hypothetical murder case based on
Shakespeare's Othello) were racist and sexist. It is not that
Williams is mistaken in her analysis of any given event, only
that her description of the event may not be based on an accurate
picture of reality.
Williams recognizes this problem when she describes how her
sister (who is an historian and serves as her alter ego) objects
to her fictionalizing identities in order to tell the truth. I
would like to quote this passage at length in that it gets at the
heart of my criticism of Williams' work.
I sit down and write my sister a long letter, including my memo.
I tell her how I have fictionalized the identities of people and
collapsed several conversations with different colleagues into
the mouths of only a few characters. My sister responds with a
phone call: she tells me I'm a coward. She thinks I should write
up everything Exactly As It Happened and have it published
somewhere. Otherwise, she says, I open myself up to being
dismissed as merely liter- ary; people will be able to say It
Didn't Happen.
Page 105 follows:
But the exams are all real, I insist, and all the events did
happen, just not all in the same instant, not all in that order;
it happened, just not exactly that way.
Then it's not true, she says, and you will have committed an act
of bad scholarship.
But my point is not to hold individual people or institu- tions
up for ridicule, I persist. I generalized because the power of
these events is precisely their generality through- out legal
education and practice. The lessons lie in the principles, not in
the personalities.
The power of these events, says my sister the historian, is that
they happened, and there is no one who is in a more ideal
position to document them in detail than you. You are just afraid
to do that.
I promise to think about what she has said, and our conver-
sation ends. And I do think about what my sister has said, long
and hard, for weeks and weeks (pp.91-92).
Despite the fact that Williams contemplates the issue of truth
telling she never tells us how she resolves the matter. Is she
telling the truth or is she fictionalizing her accounts in order
to create a kind of ideal type which serves her argument better
than the unvarnished, complex tale of What Actually Happened?
Upon reflection this question of truth telling left me somewhat
skeptical about the veracity of other stories Williams tells (how
she and her sister were held at gun point as her father was
questioned by a highway patrolmen in South Carolina [p.144]; how
she was denied entrance to an expensive clothing store in New
York because of her skin color [p.45]). My point is not that
subjective modes and story telling have no place in legal
analysis and scientific writing but that they have to be executed
in such a way that the authenticity of the narrating voice not be
questioned.
Despite this criticism, which would be damning in most instances,
there is much to learn from this painfully revealing book
especially with regard to how the law and social relations look
from the inside out. Williams is best when she explains how she
FEELS about the law or how a particular event (real or imagined)
triggers her acutely self-conscious awareness.
Several passages in this book are filled with a depth of
understanding that rivals the insight and wisdom of such writers
as Albert Camus (one thinks of the narrating voice in THE FALL);
Marguerite Duras, whom she quotes approvingly; and Etty Hillesum,
whose intimate journals document her life as a young Jewish woman
living in Holland during the holocaust years.
One passage in particular reminds us how vulnerable we all are to
becoming accomplices in other peoples' racism. When shopping in a
clothing store she remains silent while overhearing the
anti-semitic remarks of two sales persons. Why does she remain
silent? Because she believes she too is vulnerable to attack. As
Williams writes:
I am always grateful when store keepers are polite to me; I don't
expect courtesy, I value it in a way that resembles love and
trust and shelter. I value it in a way that is frequently
misleading, for it is neither love nor truth nor shelter.
I know that this valuing is a form of fear. I am afraid of being
alien and suspect, of being thrown out at any moment; I am
relieved when I am not. At the same time, I am enraged by the
possibility of this subsurface drama-waiting- to-happen. My rage
feels dangerous, full of physical vio- lence, like something that
will get me arrested. And also at the same time I am embarrassed
by all these feelings, ashamed to reveal in them the truth of my
insignificance. All this impermissible danger floats around in
me, boiling, exhausting. I can't kill and I can't teach everyone.
I can't pretend it
Page 106 follows:
doesn't bother me; it eats me alive. So I protect myself. Idon't
venture into the market very often. I don't deal with other
people if I can help it. I don't risk exposing myself to the rage
that will get me arrested. The dilemma-- and the distance between
the "I" on this side of the store and the me that is
"them" on the other side of the store--is marked by an
emptiness in myself. Frequently such emptiness is reiterated by a
hole in language, a gap in the law, or a chasm of fear (p.129).
Such passages reveal the complexity of human emotions in relation
to individual identity and action. Should one act? Should one
remain silent? In part it all depends upon the personal history
we carry around--a history that is both a reflection of who we
are and the society in which we live. Such insights might be
banal except for the fact that Williams is able to reveal through
her own experience why it is WE might feel the way WE do about a
whole host of issues, including the law. In fact, Williams whole
project can be said to do just that: to explain the law through
an understanding of ourselves. As Williams explains to her sister
early on in the book:
"I would like to write in a way that reveals the
intersubjectivity of legal constructions, that forces the reader
both to participate in the construction of meaning and to be
conscious of that process...To this end, I exploit all sorts of
literary devices, including parody, parable, and poetry....What I
hope will be filled in is connection; connection between my
psyche and the readers', between lived experience and social
perception, and between an encompass- ing historicity and a
jurisprudence of generosity" (pp.7-8).
Williams takes this subjective approach to the law in part
because traditional legal discourse, she argues, has used the
language of rationality and objectivity all the while denying
those on the margins of power (namely blacks, women and other
racial and ethnic minorities) a voice in the law. As Williams
writes of traditional legal discourse: "[M]uch of what is
spoken in so-called objective, unmediated voices is in fact mired
in hidden subjectivities and unexamined claims that make property
of others beyond the self, all the while denying such
connections" (p.11).
When Williams' method works, as it often does, I know few other
books like it in terms of providing insight into the law, as
exemplified by Williams' impassioned defense of affirmative
action and civil rights against conservative critics on the right
and Critical Legal Study theorists on the left. But when her
method falters, as I believe it does in her discussion of the
tactics used by defense lawyers in the arraignment of the three
white youths accused of beating two black youths in Howard Beach
(pp.67-69), she seems to forget that the criminal justice system
with all its inherent imperfection is an adversarial system more
analogous to competing subjectives than an inquisitorial search
for the truth.
One final observation. C.S. Lewis wrote in the concluding section
of AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM that "Literary experience
heals the wound without undermining the privilege, of individual-
ity." Two friends of ours were having dinner at our home
recent- ly. They asked if I had read Pat Williams THE ALCHEMY OF
RACE AND RIGHTS and asked me what I thought. It was difficult to
explain how I find so much that is worthwhile in a book whose
methodology I am so deeply troubled by. They understood, but both
said they felt Williams captured the essence of racism today. I
quite agree. As in the best works of literature her words also
serve to heal and transform the wounds of those who read them.
That, I suspect, is the books real alchemy.
Copyright 1991