The Alchemy of Race and Rights

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Summary: A Widely Read Manifesto of Regressive Race Relations
Review: A great deal of discourse has come out of the use of this book in my law class on the interaction of law in society, but I find it's use counter-productive to the forward-thinking goals of most academic institutions. Prof. Williams cannot seem to make up her mind on anything. She attacks Marxist lawyers, while at the same time advocating an affront to the bourgeoise, especially those without black skin (whites, Hispanics and Asians are all vilified to some degree in this book). While masquerading as a socialist activist herself, she then advocates a very right-wing goal of keeping each other in our respective racial boxes to keep order, even refusing to accept that she herself can be at once black, female and educated -- these three identities always appear separately for her. Her book is a regressive look at the future that denies the possibility of progress in race and gender relations. She is sadly unable to employ the power in her rights and instead prefers to wallow in a viscious cycle that refuses to recognize nuance, and prefers rather to assume racial categories, because they are simpler. Very few new ideas are presented in this racist, ethnically intolerant and misandric text and it is hardly worth a read, beyond the fact that it may come up in discussion.

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Summary: Sustenance for a Starving Law Student
Review: Finally, after a year and a half in law school I have found something that feels real. Professor Williams' book addresses all the unspoken assumptions and rules that frame and defines the study of law. Her voice is the first that I have heard or read which captures the frustration of existing in a world of law that is so unapologetically deficient of humanity. The book reveals the rich and thick veneer of denial that surrounds and protects those privileged by the law. She dissects the silent and invisible plague of racism that infiltrates every aspect of the law. She forces discomfort on herself and the reader in order to reach some greater knowledge or understanding.

It is the book's refusal to conform to traditional forms of legal discourse that helps to powerfully illuminate the inherent limitations, oppressions, and inadequacies of the law. The narrative form brings to life the messy complications and nuances that inhabit not just law, but our relationship as individuals, and as a nation, to race and gender.

Perhaps it is the vulnerability laid so bare, or the familiar voice of madness creeping so closely, whatever the source, the voice in the book was one of the most powerful I have heard in years. It is so refreshingly honest and brave, a book I am very grateful to have encountered.

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Summary: an interesting attempt
Review: I have read her 'Diary of a Mad Law Prof.' in The Nation with considerable interest. I really don't think she is one of the brightest bulbs in contemporary Black discourse, and I gladly turn to bell hooks and even Cornell West when I want some heady discussion of racism and the white attitudes that persist in this society. Williams seems to me one of those well meaning people who unfortunately have produced a somewhat simple-minded book, and yet it could serve as a useful corrective to similarly simple-minded books from the conservative side of things, especially Shelby Steele and co. Overall, this book has little to teach anyone actively involved in changing attitudes, but it is a fair attempt nonetheless.

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Summary: Wonderful
Review: I read this book for a paper I never actually wrote, but it was worth it. Patricia Williams successfully bridges the gap between philosophy and real life, showing us that the gap need not exist at all. Williams reads the entire world, and her entire life, as if it were a philosophical or legal text, and does philosophy as if it really mattered. She is a thinker of great sensitivity. Her juxtaposition of a hip Manhattan store selling cheap coats but excluding "bums" from taking advantage of the bargain with a homeless man lurching through traffic, truly in need of a cheap coat, remains one of the most moving passages I have ever read. You know, I really liked this book!

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Summary: A Masterpiece of Race Studies
Review: I recently had the pleasure of re-reading this remarkable book. Over the past half-century, it is no doubt one of the most important books on race published in the United States. The author blends autobiography, keen visual observations, analysis, and heart into a powerful journey through the landscape of American race relations. The result is utterly convincing: the convergence of the "personal and the political" moves each reader to examine his or her own relationship to the subjects at hand. While most race books pontificate, this one eases the reader into examining some very difficult, indeed painful questions. Williams, a writer of great skill and elegance, has pulled off a miricale in the field of race writing, an enduring masterpiece that has changed the way we think and talk about race in America.

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Summary: amazing :)
Review: the alchemy of race and rights is truly an amazing book - williams weaves legal theorizing, theorizing about the nature of subjectivity, race theory, and literary analysis into an incredibly *human* book which is beautifully crafted.

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Summary: Williams gets a bit right, but misses the larger picture
Review: There are a few parts of this book which are really interesting. For example, at one point Williams lists the assumptions behind many white residents' callous responses to a horrible act of racist (anti-black) violence in their neighborhood. Although anyone would know that the residents' responses were wrong, Williams does a great job of pinpointing *why* they're wrong by showing the larger implications of the residents' thinking.

Unfortunately, Williams cannot apply this to her own thinking. At times, she is downright offensive. I thought the clearest example of this was when she discussed Tawana Brawley. Brawley was discovered lying in garbage, scrawled with racial slurs. She implicated several individual men in her "attack." Ultimately, it came out that Brawley had dressed herself up to look as though she had been attacked, as a way to explain an extended absence to a violent and abusive stepfather.

Under the circumstances, I think it would be hard for compassionate people not to feel for Brawley. But Williams goes much, much farther. She implies that news reports indicating that Brawley's mutilation was a *self*-mutilation are not only irrelevant, but morally wrong in that they imply that Brawley is not a real victim. Yet those news reports were also *exonerating* the men Brawley had named as guilty!

The most amazing example of Williams's bizarre lack of compassion for the (white) men Brawley accused came when Williams attacked news reports saying Brawley "did it to herself" because they imply that "suicide" (she means self-mutilation more generally) is not a public concern. Two pages later, she notes as an afterthought that one of the men Brawley falsely accused killed himself as the accusation tore apart his life.

Self-mutilation is a public concern, when it's a black teen's, to the extent that reporters may not even point out that it is *self*-mutilation; suicide is not a public concern, when it's a white male's, to the extent that the press may not even report that the accusations which caused it were false.

Williams's arguments fall apart as soon as the situation gets complicated. At other times, her position just seems bizarre, as in her celebration of "Real White Men's Day."

Her PC-ness was also way over the top; when she mentioned a transsexual person, she felt inexplicably obligated to include the following sentence: "By no means do I want to imply, in my recounting of S., any implication that this was all there was to her story or that her story explains transsexuality: there is a whole range of transsexuality beyond S. herself, as well as an S. who exists beyond my limited characterization or experience of her." I could not find anything in Williams's discussion of S. which necessitated that sort of disclaimer.

In addition, Williams has an extremely unfortunate tendency to lapse into nonsense. Whole paragraphs would be clearly written, easily understood, and intelligent; unfortunately, they would invariably be followed by pages of what I can only describe as babble--to the extent that neither I, nor my mother (a much smarter woman than I) could actually parse the sentences to take a stab at what Williams might mean.

As one example of such a ridiculous sentence, here's a gem which is actually a quote; it's one of three hilarious paragraphs Williams quotes from Lacan: "It was inevitable that analysis, after stressing the reintegration of the tendencies excluded by the ego, in so far as they are subjacent to the symptoms that it tackled in the first instance, and which were bound up for the most part with the failures of Oedipal identification, should eventually discover the 'moral' dimension of the problem." I promise that the context does not make that sentence make sense.

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Summary: Fabulous Book for the Open-Minded
Review: This is an extraordinary book. Through the use of a wide array of reasoning and writing methods, Williams makes it possible for us to get a glimpse of the dangerous and contradictory legal world that ethnic minorities must negotiate to survive. It may be a bit of a stretch for people unaccustomed to thinking outside the box as well as those unfamilar with literature and literary theory. But the insight Williams offers is well worth the effort. It also provides members of the privileged class with the unusual & valuable experience of not being the central focus of the text. A fabulous experience for readers with an open mind!

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Summary: More gibberish from the good professor
Review: What a dreary tome. Ms. Professor Williams has a unique ability to obscure the most obvious and trite revelations in pedantic and turgid prose that she thinks is thrillingly poetic because the words are long-winded and flowery. and that's when she's making sense, which isn't very often. the rest of her writings tend to be either outright calls for more preferences for her preferred friends camouflaged as courageous iconoclasm, or just plain idiocy posing as intellectually daring originality. Sadly enough, if Thomas Kuhn is right, we'll have the likes of Professor Pat around for another couple of decades. (But hey, if you have the money, you can always sign up for the Nation's annual cruise and talk about the revolution with Pat and the gang for a mere 8 grand or so....)

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Summary: Fabulous Book for the Open-Minded
Review: Williams style is more of a problem than her substance. She uses numerous anecdotal stories, told from one side, some of which are dubious in truth, and rare questionably-derived statistics, to demonstrate an invisible undercurrent of racism from whites against blacks, and these are the issues she addresses best. Her style could perhaps best be described as varying between insightful and incoherent, with I'm afraid more of the latter.
Williams argues in the beginning of her book against generalization, that "reconceptualizing from "objective truth" to rhetorical event will be a more nuanced sense of legal and social responsibility," (p.11) then proceeds to generalize and polarize whites and blacks and generalize about numerous other issues throughout the book:
"White women are prostitutes; black women are whores" p. 175
"To say that blacks never fully believed in rights is true" p. 163
"Blacks are thus, in full culturally imagistic terms, not merely unmothered but badly fathered, abused and disowned by whites." p. 163
Argues would probably be a bad choice of word, for logic is the study of arguments, and Williams is neither consistent nor logical. In style, Williams is neither clear nor concise, and in one word, rambles.