- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press (9 May 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0674014707
- ISBN-13: 978-0674014701
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 16 x 2.5 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,668,634 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Williams melds sophisticated legal scholarship, memoir and allegory into a rich melange that will change perceptions about the substance and spirit of black women...At a time when the nation is wrestling with political correctness or wrongness...Williams' candor about the law and her life is refreshing..."The Alchemy of Race and Rights" brings jurisprudence to the people while leaving no doubt that the author is among the finest legal talents among us.--Evelyn C. White "San Francisco Chronicle "
Product Description
Patricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. "The Alchemy of Race and Rights" is an eloquent autobiographical essay in which the author reflects on the intersection of race, gender, and class. Using the tools of critical literary and legal theory, she sets out her views of contemporary popular culture and current events, from Howard Beach to homelessness, from Tawana Brawley to the law-school classrom, from civil rights to Oprah Winfrey, from Bernhard Goetz to Marth Beth Whitehead. She also traces the workings of "ordinary racism"--everyday occurences, casual, unintended, banal perhaps, but mortifying. Taking up the metaphor of alchemy, Williams casts the law as a mythological text in which the powers of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, sanity and insanity, wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries of discourse. In deliberately transgressing such boundaries, she persues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately, transformative.
Williams gets to the roots of racism not by fingerpointing but by much gentler methods. Her book is full of anecdote and witness, vivid characters known and observed, trenchant analysis of the law's shortcomings. Only by such an inquiry and such patient phenomenology can we understand racism. The book is deeply moving and not so, finally, just because racism is wrong--we all know that. What we don't know is how to unthink the process that allows racism to persist. THis Williams enables us to see. The result is a testament of considerable beauty, a triumph of moral tactfullness, The result, as the title suggests, is magic.
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13 reviews
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Sustenance for a Starving Law Student
27 Mar 2001
Format:Paperback
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.
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
A Masterpiece of Race Studies
21 Oct 1999
Format:Hardcover
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.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Fabulous Book for the Open-Minded
5 May 2003
Format:Paperback
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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