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 classroom,
from civil rights to Oprah Winfrey, from Bernhard Goetz to Mary
Beth Whitehead. She also traces the workings of “ordinary
racism”—everyday occurrences, 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
pursues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately,
transformative. Williams gets to the roots of racism not by
finger-pointing 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 tactfulness. The result, as the title suggests, is magic.
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