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Brilliant essays from the renowned Nation columnist—aka the Mad
Law Professor—tackling questions of identity, bioethics, race,
surveillance, and more Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on
a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a black man’s
leg surgically attached (with the expired black leg-donor in the
foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist
Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core
questions of identity, ethics, and race. With her trademark elegant
prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a
keen analytic eye and a lawyer’s training to chapters exploring
the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body
parts to gene sequences—and the particular ways in which our laws
in these areas isolate non-normative looks, minority cultures, and
out-of-the-box thinkers. At the heart of “Wrongful Birth” is a
lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their
child “comes out black”; “Bodies in Law” explores the
service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the
question of who owns DNA. And “Hot Cheeto Girl” examines the
way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human
assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned
destiny. In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne
Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation
on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural
slippage collide.
This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a
fascinating woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right
place in the most interesting times. Of racially mixed heritage,
Anita Reynolds was proudly African American but often passed for
Indian, Mexican, or Creole. Actress, dancer, model, literary
critic, psychologist, but above all free-spirited provocateur, she
was, as her Parisian friends nicknamed her, an "American cocktail."
One of the first black stars of the silent era, she appeared in
Hollywood movies with Rudolph Valentino, attended Charlie Chaplin's
anarchist meetings, and studied dance with Ruth St. Denis. She
moved to New York in the 1920s and made a splash with both Harlem
Renaissance elites and Greenwich Village bohemians. An emigre in
Paris, she fell in with the Left Bank avant garde, befriending
Antonin Artaud, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso. Next, she took up
residence as a journalist in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War
and witnessed firsthand the growing menace of fascism. In 1940, as
the Nazi panzers closed in on Paris, Reynolds spent the final days
before the French capitulation as a Red Cross nurse, afterward
making a mad dash for Lisbon to escape on the last ship departing
Europe. In prose that perfectly captures the globetrotting
nonchalance of its author, American Cocktail presents a
stimulating, unforgettable self-portrait of a truly extraordinary
woman.
For decades, the field of bioethics has shaped the way we think
about ethical problems in science, technology, and medicine. But
its traditional emphasis on individual interests such as
doctor-patient relationships, informed consent, and personal
autonomy is minimally helpful in confronting the social and
political challenges posed by new human biotechnologies such as
assisted reproduction, human genetic modification, and DNA
forensics. Beyond Bioethics addresses these provocative issues from
an emerging standpoint that is attentive to race, gender, class,
disability, privacy, and notions of democracy-a "new biopolitics."
This authoritative volume provides an overview for those grappling
with the profound dilemmas posed by these developments. It brings
together the work of cutting-edge thinkers from diverse fields of
study and public engagement, all of them committed to this new
perspective grounded in social justice and public interest values.
In 1960, in the small town of Allenville, Mississippi, Cerena
Wailes' world had turned upside down. This bubbly, vibrant eight
year old African American little girl was a product of incest,
molestation and rape, all the acts took place within her family.
Although her family was dysfunctional, they had a strong Christian
background. Cerena, better known as, CeeCee, didn't understand why
God would allow these terrible acts to happen to her. The senseless
acts were done to her until the age eighteen. She carried the
emotional scars of rejection, unforgiveness, hatred, abandonment,
low-self esteem, bitterness and pain. SHe couldn't love anyone
else, because she didn't love herself. She would sabotage
friendships and relationships, fearing they had a motive in getting
close to her. Later in life, she accepted Jesus Christ into her
life and began to walk in her calling, but yet she was preaching
from a place of pain and she was damaged but not delivered. See how
her story unfolds.
For decades, the field of bioethics has shaped the way we think
about ethical problems in science, technology, and medicine. But
its traditional emphasis on individual interests such as
doctor-patient relationships, informed consent, and personal
autonomy is minimally helpful in confronting the social and
political challenges posed by new human biotechnologies such as
assisted reproduction, human genetic modification, and DNA
forensics. Beyond Bioethics addresses these provocative issues from
an emerging standpoint that is attentive to race, gender, class,
disability, privacy, and notions of democracy-a "new biopolitics."
This authoritative volume provides an overview for those grappling
with the profound dilemmas posed by these developments. It brings
together the work of cutting-edge thinkers from diverse fields of
study and public engagement, all of them committed to this new
perspective grounded in social justice and public interest values.
This is a story of my life. I shared occurrences that happened to
me and my ten siblings, growing up, in a small town near
Marksville, Louisiana. My father would abuse us physically,
verbally and mentally to the point at the age of thirteen, I got
married, trying to escape the madness. The abuse from my spouse
started just like my father treated me.
Don't make balancing family and ministry complicated. Hear the
voice of God and study His word. Don't neglect your family for
ministry, and don't neglect ministry for your family, pray and ask
God to balance it. Life will be more pleasurable. This is a perfect
way to draw your unsaved family members to Christ.
How to care for a love one with Dementia without becoming
overwhelmed with stress and leaning on the strength of God
A warm and seductive meditation on the personal and political from
a renowned columnist and "one of the great theorists of race and
law" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).
With her trademark wit and insight, Patricia Williams relates
stories from the many facets of her life--as a lawyer, scholar,
writer, African-American, descendant of slaves, mother, and single,
fifty-something woman--always aware of the ironies inherent in
situations where her many identities don't conform to societal
expectations. "The Open House" of Williams's imagination takes us
on a funny, often provocative, and entertaining journey which
includes Oprah, Williams's Aunt Mary who passed as white, her Best
White Friend, and tips on how to eat a watermelon without fear of
racial judgment.
In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the
prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks
how we might achieve a world where "color doesn't matter"--where
whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism
and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the
great divide between "the poles of other people's imagination and
the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides," and
discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving
racism. Williams offers us a new starting point--"a sensible and
sustained consideration"--from which we might begin to deal
honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices.
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.
"Jamaica is the land where the rooster lays an egg...When a
Jamaican is born of a black woman and some English or Scotsman, the
black mother is literally and figuratively kept out of sight as far
as possible, but no one is allowed to forget that white father,
however questionable the circumstances of birth...You get the
impression that these virile Englishmen do not require women to
reproduce. They just come out to Jamaica, scratch out a nest and
lay eggs that hatch out into 'pink' Jamaicans." --Zora Neale
Hurston We may no longer issue scarlet letters, but from the way we
talk, we might as well: W for welfare, S for single, B for black,
CC for children having children, WT for white trash. To a culture
speaking with barely masked hysteria, in which branding is done
with words and those branded are outcasts, this book brings a voice
of reason and a warm reminder of the decency and mutual respect
that are missing from so much of our public debate. Patricia J.
Williams, whose acclaimed book The Alchemy of Race and Rights
offered a vision for healing the ailing spirit of the law, here
broadens her focus to address the wounds in America's public soul,
the sense of community that rhetoric so subtly but surely makes and
unmakes. In these pages we encounter figures and images plucked
from headlines--from Tonya Harding to Lani Guinier, Rush Limbaugh
to Hillary Clinton, Clarence Thomas to Dan Quayle--and see how
their portrayal, encoding certain stereotypes, often reveals more
about us than about them. What are we really talking about when we
talk about welfare mothers, for instance? Why is calling someone a
"redneck" okay, and what does that say about our society? When
young women appear on Phil Donahue to represent themselves as
Jewish American Princesses, what else are they doing? These are
among the questions Williams considers as she uncovers the
shifting, often covert rules of conversation that determine who
"we" are as a nation.
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