A Ring of Voices: Reflections on the Alchemy of Race and Rights


A RING OF VOICES: REFLECTIONS
ON THE ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS

Instead of presenting a traditional book review, the members of the Journal
turned to those people Patricia Williams thanks "for their invaluable
conversation, inspiration, friendship, and encouragement"' for their
reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor.

4:00 a.m. Thoughts on Teaching and Learning Contracts:

An Open Letter to Pat Williams

1/10/92

Dear Pat,

A leaflet for Talmudic Studies literature appeared in my mailbox a couple of
weeks ago proclaiming, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."
What does this mean? "The" teacher, "the" student, as two individual
beings? The teacher and student in each of us? Perhaps a reminder, an insight
that when we are ready to learn, every person, every experience potential-
ly will be our teacher? What is it that we hope for from our students, from
ourselves? I think of the Chinese phrase "Qing Chu er Shenyu Ian" (literal-
ly, Green comes out of but is deeper than Blue), referring to the student sur-
passing the teacher, the hope of Chinese teachers to see a piece of themselves
carried forward in this linear building of the future upon the past. Chinese
and Talmudic visions of our limited mortality knocking on my door at 4:00
a.m. Go away, I say, I want to sleep. But instead I turn on the computer and
wonder what city you are in and remember what I need to tell you.

Only a few months ago, a number of my first-year law students were
again demanding of me, "Why are we reading Pat Williams? What rele-
vance do dogs, small or big, polar bears, or any of this have to the study of
law? Couldn't we just focus on the RULES?" Again, the challenge of
beginnings, the irony of the attraction of law to those who walk in the doors
armed with an overwhelming need for a belief in certainty, answers, and
predictability. The perceived chaos closes in almost immediately, as a
seemingly solid beach begins to shift in layers of sand.

' Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
Professor, Acknowledgements (1991).



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

After a previous effort to adopt a law and economics contracts casebook (a
casting-against-type experiment with guess who surviving as the more
authoritative voice), I have switched to using Knapp and Crystal's casebook
(which integrates skills, theory, and doctrinal teaching), a separate anthol-
ogy of contracts reading by Peter Linzer, and a supplemental packet of cases
(Baby M, Local 1330) and other readings. I assign excerpts of The Alchemy
of Race and Rights. And in unapologetically authoritarian rulemaking fash-
ion, I say everything is "required" reading. No hierarchy of relevance to the
task of becoming future lawyers, teachers, judges, and scholars.

Unacknowledged questions have a way of seething and of building a wall
of resistance to learning on the part of the students or diminishing the
integrity of a class. So, early in the semester, I decide to try to respond to the
very questions I explicitly and implicitly encourage. To ask about the basis
for choices. To scrutinize the implicit value systems of others, of judges, of
colleagues, of teachers, and examine and re-examine their choices that are
shaped by these systems. Why are there so few challenges or questions about
why they are reading Richard Posner's work? Instead they ask why I have
assigned them pieces from The Alchemy of Race and Rights. What have I
been saying in response? That, first, it contains an obvious subject matter
echo of the doctrinal and conceptual themes identified in the syllabus. The
nature of the market order, parol evidence, contract formation, the making
and breaking of promises. The limits of what can be the "object" of mar-
ket exchange. Secondly, that on a "skills" level, I feel part of my job is to
train them to "think like a lawyer" and that part of this requires them to be
able to recognize legal categories of analysis and to function within these
categories. I said that law is like this constructed house with many rooms.
The rooms have fancy labels like "Torts," "Criminal Law," or "Contracts,"
each room dictating a particular language and etiquette. That to use law
effectively they must recognize the doors and walls of these rooms, even
as self-proclaimed expert room builders and deconstructionists move
walls mysteriously. That I assign your work because you UNDERMINE
AND EXPOSE the constructedness, the contingency, and the power dimen-
sions of this whole process. That your teaching and scholarship give one
hope that one can be a woman, a black woman, a law teacher, and yet sur-
vive the constraints of being an oxymoron and speak eloquently, beautifully,
in the language of poetry, of dreams, of law, in any room you choose.
That you show us the power of yelling over and through walls. To bear wit-
ness to our histories and visions, to the potentiality of alternative futures
in each of us. To attempt to see differently yet simultaneously the visions
of (an)other, of others.

146 [Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

I have just finished grading the final exams and reading 160 "reflection
memos" from my Law and the Market Economy I students. You remem-
ber, the class you taught while at CUNY, the class you filled with poetry,
passion, and insight. And, of course, contracts. A tough act to follow. I
began the semester on the first day of class by handing out three "hypos"
drawn from Hamer v. Sidway, Local 1330, and Baby M and asked, "What
Promises Should the Law Enforce?" One student asked how they were sup-
posed to answer when they hadn't started studying contracts yet. I remind-
ed them that the people who walked in the law school door yesterday had
pre-law school lives, personal values, and worldviews. That I couldn't
believe that they had lost all of that by the second day of law school. That
it is important to be in touch with who we are, or sometime down the road
we look in the mirror and wonder where that stranger with the briefcase
came from. I told the story about Dinesh's little son who, while visiting one
day, drew a picture of the law school as a factory building with a variety
of people going in one end and coming out the other identical clones. I also
suggested that every reason they were about to give about enforceability
would return during the semester, dressed up in black authoritative robes,
maybe wearing a white wig or parading fancy labels like policy argu-
ments. That all these legal and policy rationales they would begin to see
over and over arose from the very same human impulses which determined
their responses that first day.

The end-of-the-semester reflective writing assignment asked the students
to review their answers from that first day; identify the underlying values
and assumptions which shaped their initial answers; characterize the
worldview which was reflected; and discuss how and if their perspec-
tives and responses to the same three hypos, now recognizable as "real"
cases, had changed.

One student begins his reflection:

There I sat, a polar bear in the initial class of Law and the Market
Economy... yes, like the rest of the polar bears in the auditorium, I was
innocent, hungry and more than just fearful of the tremendous awaken-
ing which was about to occur.

Like the majority of the students who had responded on that first day way
back in September with a formalistic insistence on and belief in the "right"
answer, one student looks in the reflective mirror and muses: Could I have been
Ms. Williston reborn? Another student comments about the ability of parties
to a contract to change their minds: That the powerless are controlled by words
they have uttered in the past, while the powerful may retract their words. And

1992] 147



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

peppered throughout the reflections are life invocations of all the pieces of
their experience: the Supremes (Reflections of the... way life used to be and estop
... in the name of love); their past lives as social workers, probation officers,
labor organizers, paralegals, real estate agents, police officers, mothers,
fathers, children; and memories and images from films and novels.

And in referring to your writing:

Is she inviting us to partake in chaos? Does her position free us to be
enslaved by anarchy?

Her abstract, poetic, sometimes down-right strange interpretations of
Contract Law guided me to her idea that contracts become in essence the
decision makers-they absolve accountability.

Williams suggests that the Baby "M" case reflects the illusion, delusion
and self-righteousness in which judges and lawyers talk about results;
everything somehow fits into a category, so that human experiences, the
reality that people change their minds and emotions is erased. In retro-
spect, my line of thinking was precisely the mode of legal discourse that
Williams criticizes in her writing.

Pat Williams is all by herself. She is always addressing the most obvious
of which is overlooked by many. That is, how powerful our past and pre-
sent are to determine our vision, to interpret what is equitable. (com-
paring you to Richard Posner and Ian Macneil)

Voices like hers do serve a purpose to make us think twice about every case
we judge, litigate or pursue.... I do stop and shudder to think what it
would be like if these voices were never heard at all.

And, yes, there were comments critiquing the constraints of the assignment
itself, which presented "categories" of question and experience for guid-
ing their reflection. Awareness of the artificiality of walls, of the shapes of
rooms ....

I also gave a multiple-choice final examination with several fact patterns:
a media tycoon tries to buy a newspaper and in the usual course of incom-
plete human deals, dies. There are gift issues (he signs a pledge to the hos-
pital) and the usual contract formation and defense issues. His will asks his
daughter to arrange for an in vitro fertilization of his frozen sperm. Yes, not
only create replicas of ourselves, but create those replicas from beyond
death. The complication is that the egg is donated by his daughter's lover,
then fertilized and implanted in a "surrogate" gestational mother. On top

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

of this, it is later discovered that the Fertility Center has mixed up the
sperm. The option question on the exam was to make up a multiple-choice
question with four possible choices based on the facts given and identify the
correct choice with a supporting rationale. Many of the questions stu-
dents submitted began with the description of a hypothetical "bench" fol-
lowed by questions as to the likely ruling of this bench on possible issues
raised by the facts. You and Richard Posner were the two most popular ref-
erences! Aside from the bizarre combination of individuals (Williston,
Unger, Posner, Duncan Kennedy, Andrew McThenia, and you) and the
obvious relish with which the students were theoretical-role-playing, some-
thing had obviously been sparked in their imaginations as they invoked
images of authority and power.

Do you remember a winter's letter sent years ago?... I was sitting in my
Beijing apartment and wrote to you:

I am so glad that you are in the world, even though at this moment
you are on the other side of the world .... I wish for you always a
nurturing space for your Practicing of Word magic and the Undoing
of the Word-Combination Locks. I wish you were here to share this
morning, to have coffee together, to inhale the fragrance of the beau-
tiful water hyacinths which just opened on our window ledge, whis-
pering spring. Instead I think of you far away amidst a city of
concrete, putting on the mask of the sorcerer you have depowered and
going forth in the luminous golden light you yourself have revealed.

When you are next dodging authority bullets, or next time you are feeling
in a depressed slump, padding around in your terry robe, think of these
reflective voices and wonder about students who could begin to create
visions of judicial benches presided over by a Judge Williams. These stu-
dents, our teachers, all going forward in the luminous light which owns
them, and each one of us.

Sharon K. Horn*

Associate Professor of Law, CUNY Law School. New York University
School of Law, J.D. Fulbright Professor, People's Republic of China (1986-88). I
thank all of my students, especially the Law and the Market Economy (1990-91) class
for their patience with my learning, and the Law and the Market Economy (Fall '91)
class for sharing their thoughtful and provocative reflections with me. Special
thanks to the following students for the use of excerpts from their final reflection
papers: Dorothy Kaldi, Paula Notori, Carolyn Rose, Karl J. Ruppert, Alida Shatzer,
Garth W. Snide, Virginia Tomicich, Mary Madeline Wilcox, and Sherry Zweback.

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

The Art of the Alchemist: A Conversation with a Law Professor

Roberta J. Cordano*

Alchemy

Being unfamiliar with the concept of alchemy, I endeavored to find the
history and meaning of the word. My findings were consistent with the
task that Patricia Williams sought to accomplish in The Alchemy of Race and
Rights. According to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages,' and most medieval
scholars, alchemy is "the art and science of transforming base metals
into noble metals, silver and gold."2 Another view that became particu-
larly powerful in the sixteenth century "regarded alchemy as a spiritual
and mystical experience that transformed the experimenter himself."3

Alchemists shared a common fundamental belief in the "idea of the unity
of all matter, which permitted decomposition and recomposition, a pro-
cess symbolized by the ouroboros-the mythical dragon that swallows its
own tail." 4

In her book, Patricia Williams takes base experiences of life and trans-
forms them into noble ideas and theories. Whether the word- and theory-
magic Williams worked in her book transformed her life, I can't say; but it
has certainly suggested new perspectives and challenged my thinking. In
writing this book, Williams rattled my cages, freed some of the rage with-
in me, and helped me to see possibilities for shaping my experiences with-
in and without the limits of traditional legal discourse.

* Roberta "Bobbi" Cordano is currently an attorney with the Consumer
Division of the Office of the Attorney General in Minnesota. She graduated Phi Beta
Kappa from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin in 1986 and graduated from the
University of Wisconsin Law School in 1990. The views expressed in this article are
those of the author only. Ms. Cordano wishes to thank her family, especially her
parents, for their support.

'Joseph R. Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages (1982).
Id. at 134.
Id.
Id. at 139.

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Under the Celestial City and at the Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea

I am a Deaf- woman attorney. At present, I am one of perhaps eighteen
Deaf attorneys in the United States (and perhaps the world).6 As I read the
parable about "The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea,"7 I visualized Deaf
men, women, and children clamoring for access, justice, and equality.
Throughout the book, I found myself able to substitute the word "Deaf" for
"Black": oppression, exclusion, disenfranchisement, and non-propertization
are experiences we share. Our histories and our origins may not be iden-
tical, but our experiences and our need for "rights-commitment"8 are
powerfully alike.

Patricia Williams demands that attention be given to "those vital
voices sometimes lost on the unattended side of the unthinkingly-imposed
boundaries of any sorts."' She masterfully pulls together stories of events
occurring around the world and relates them to her own life and experience
as an African-American woman. She bares her indignation and puts her
foot forward in a march for a voice in our legal system. For Deaf people,
our struggle in the legal system lies in combatting the pathological view of
our lives and our existence. Definitions of disability center on medical anal-
yses of our "conditions" and/or on our value as potential market actors.'"

I learned this lesson when I was thirteen years old. My older sister, who
is also Deaf, requested a sign-language interpreter for her large-group

3 In this article, I will be following a convention proposed by James Woodward
(1972) and used by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries in their book, Deaf in
America. When referring to people who have the audiological condition of not hear-
ing, I will use the lowercase term "deaf," and when referring to the group of deaf
people who share a language-American Sign Language (ASL)-I will use the
uppercase term "Deaf." See Carol Padden & Tom Humphries, Deaf in America:
Voices from a Culture 2 (1988).

"Today there are only about 15 hearing impaired attorneys in the coun-
try." 19 Gallaudet Today 7 (Spring 1989). At the time I was enrolled in law school,
I was aware of three other Deaf students studying law.

I Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
Professor 3-14 (1991).

" Pre-publication manuscript of Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and
Rights: Diary of a Law Professor 163-65 [hereinafter Pre-publication manuscript].

I Id. at 22.
10 In one meeting, Williams and I discussed the difference in treatment of

elderly people with disabilities and children with disabilities. Laws regarding elder-
ly people with disabilities tend to focus on the enjoyment of life. In contrast, laws
affecting children with disabilities tend to emphasize methods for measuring
them as economic units (e.g., identifying their "functional levels") and methods for
accommodating them to and assimilating them into society. In other words, the laws
focus on their abilities to become market actors.

19921



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

classes" and later her swimming classes in high school. What ensued was
a bitter battle between my sister, my parents, and the school board.
Ultimately, the school board determined that they did not need to provide
an interpreter for my sister's large-group classes because she was ranked
fifth in her class academically. They predicted that she would be able to
enter the working world, and perhaps even college, successfully. This fact
was proof, in their eyes, that they were "reasonably accommodating" her.
The board, however, relented with regard to her swimming class, not only
because my sister did not wear a hearing aid during the classes, but also
because the gymnasium received federal funding for building additions;
therefore, they admitted that they were legally obligated under Section 504
of Title V of the Rehabilitation Act of 197312 to provide an interpreter. No
regard or discussion was given to the issue of equal access to information
in class. Although she was ranked fifth in her class, her ranking did not in
any way adequately attest to her experience as a young Deaf woman,
specifically her isolation and frustration.

The school board's decision had implications for me as well. It sent me
a chilling message that as long as I compensated for my loss and per-
formed well academically, I would have no right to equal access to infor-
mation in school. Where was the jus? I didn't see it then, and I still don't
today. To me and all the Deaf folks in town, it was obvious that providing
an interpreter for my sister's large-group classes was the minimum obli-
gation the school had under the "reasonable accommodation" require-
ment of the law. My sister and my parents were not asking for an interpreter
for all of my sister's classes, just for those few large-groups where she
missed anywhere from thirty to eighty-five percent of the information.
Clearly, with no legal precedent honoring our experience and knowledge,
our views were lost on the hearing administrators of the school district and
their lawyers. The dialectic of "disability rights" discourse may be that,
while it intends to release individuals from oppression, it may have the ulti-
mate effect of trapping, limiting, and boxing the individual within her dis-
ability, rather than releasing her from it.'3

" The "large-group classes" were held once a week for particular subjects at
the high school. All sections taking that particular subject would gather in an audi-
torium for films and lectures.

12 Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Pub. L. No. 93-112, § 504, 87 Stat. 355, 394 (1973)
(codified as amended at 29 U.S.C. § 794 (Supp. V. 1981)).

" The Supreme Court decision in Davis v. Southeastern Community College,
424 F. Supp. 1341 (E.D.N.C. 1976), modified, 574 F.2d 1158 (4th Cir. 1978), rev'd, 442
U.S. 397 (1979), is a classic example of this limiting. Because the Court determined
that Ms. Davis could not "function" in the operating room (because the doctors and
staff wore masks) and in the emergency room, she was found to be a person

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Patricia Williams challenges the boundaries of legal discourse and
strongly encourages incorporating a multivalent and multicultural
approach. Legal discourse today is sorely lacking in discussion and recog-
nition of Deaf people as a culturally and linguistically distinct group. The
result is what Williams terms "spirit murder": the "disregard for others
whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard." 14 As Williams and I
once agreed, the experience of African-Americans and Deaf people may be
the inverse of each other. For African-Americans, hate and fear commit spir-
it murder. Although fear may play a part, paternalism, silence, and omis-
sion spirit murder us. In American Sign Language (ASL), one example of
how this sentiment is expressed is in our sign for the legally sanctioned con-
cept of mainstreaming. The "technical" sign for mainstreaming in ASL:

is two hands, fingers fanned out horizontally, meshing together like
brooks forming a river. The slang sign is one hand, fingers fanned,
pressing down on a single finger from the other hand, a visual pun
on a similar sign for the word "oppression."'

Too often Deaf voices and Deaf experiences are omitted from the cre-
ation and interpretation of laws which directly affect our lives. Part of the
reason for this void is the absence of Deaf professionals in the legal field.
Until the voice and experience of Deaf people carry weight in the legal field,
formal equality will continue to be an empty promise.

Tell Us More About Polar Bears

The feelings and memories that surfaced when I read this book left me
wondering: "So, what are we left with, Patricia Williams?" Destitution? ("Is
there no place to dump this toxic rage?" 6 ) Or hope? ("Nothing is simple.
Each day is a new labor." 7) I can just imagine you quietly answering, "It
depends on the day you ask me."

who was not "otherwise qualified" to become a licensed nurse. Nowhere in this
decision did the Court explore the myriad of ways Davis easily could have been
accommodated. Nor did the Court have the insight to see the value her deafness
might have in the nursing profession. For example, with training (whether with
the surgical clinical or not) she could have been a school nurse for a residential
school or a nurse in a nursing home or hospital (particularly one with Deaf residents
or patients).

" Williams, supra note 7, at 73.
" Douglas Clement, Those Who Will Not Hear, Minn. Monthly, Oct. 1989, at

44.
16 Pre-publication manuscript, supra note 8, at 151.
"7 Williams, supra note 7, at 130.

19921



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

the storyteller's voice

Maureen McCafferty*

In Ireland the storyteller, the seanchdi, is a revered person, the holder
and dispenser of truths about the world and ourselves, truths we find
nowhere else-not in religion, not in science, not in law. (Priests of these
disciplines might dispute this assertion. Being a storyteller, I don't.) The
epiphanous power of the story has to do with boundaries, I think. Like
myths and fables that break all boundaries of reality (to plunge to one even
deeper), the stories our mothers and fathers tell us about our families, about
themselves, stories coming from their mothers and fathers, come to us, even
when we don't realize it, as our most powerful realities to be heard, told,
and continued somehow-that's usually the dilemma of a lifetime: mak-
ing new boundaries, making them our own. It's a matter of finding our own
voices, identities, boundaries, selves. I mention these things because they
are what I see in Pat's work, what I hear in her voice: the thoughtful, care-
ful voice of the storyteller who can distill the remarkable from the ordinary.
There is tremendous power in Pat's work. For me it is the power of trans-
formation: the shaping of the ordinary into something that lets us see
why we are not ordinary, why we do not need to be bound by old lines and
definitions, old ways of seeing what it is to be lawyer, teacher, sister,
daughter, woman, black woman, person in this world, in our world.

Part of the power of Pat's writing, of course, is that it ignores all
boundaries, goes walking over them, down new roads, turns and angles
seeming familiar and unfamiliar to us at the same time. I am a fiction writ-
er, not a lawyer, but working at CUNY Law School I've read (and typed)
my share of legal scholarship. It is very formal stuff, winding purposefully,
deliberately, through abstraction upon abstraction, leaving the uninitiat-
ed reader gasping for air, or for anything resembling air. It is often writ-
ing that removes, or at least seems to remove, more of the world than it lets
in, more people than it takes in. It takes the messy, disordered, chaotic, dis-
turbing realities of people's lives and reduces them to fact patterns to be

* Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing from Syracuse University; stories recent-
ly published in American Writing, Blue Ryder, and upcoming in Rhino and Arizona
Mandala. Maureen McCafferty was Pat Williams' secretary for several years at
CUNY Law School.

[Vol. 2:1154



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

coolly sifted through for relevant details, the rest discarded. It's not life as
most of us know it. It's not meant to be. But what is it meant to be? I have
the feeling that this question is one that's been discarded along the way to
wherever we are. What drew me to Pat Williams' work, what made me see
the connections between the law and how we live or try to live every day
in this society, was that her words and sensibilities were the ones usually
excluded from most legal categories of things and people to recognize.
Rather than collapsing the world, Pat's words express connections, draw
in and expand the realities around us. Nothing is excluded, not the image
of herself, or anyone else, sitting before the television "in an old terry
bathrobe with a little fringe of blue and white tassels dangling from the
hem"' mesmerized by the insanity of the world she watches go by on that
television as she searches for her way out of the insanity to sanity. Pat says
that she is "constantly reconfiguring herself in the world." 2 That's the
heart of each story: that there is a way out, out of the mess, the destruction,
the hopelessness, the insanity on its global scale. The way out starts with
seeing yourself, picturing yourself, who you are, where you came from, how
you got to wherever you are at the moment: at home with a headache, too
sick and depressed to do a thing, but doing it.

In her chapter "Crimes Without Passion," Pat writes: "Writing for me
is an act of sacrifice, not denial.... I deliberately sacrifice myself in my writ-
ing. I leave no part of myself out, for that is how much I want readers to
connect with me .... What is 'impersonal' writing but denial of self?" 3

Everything in Pat's writing tells us that for too long there has been too much
denial, exclusion, disconnection, all done in the name of impersonal, neu-
tral, objective standards. But those on the outside of the supposed objec-
tivity have always known there's been nothing neutral about it: there's
always been something insidious and corrupt about that smug objective look
that takes itself past non-white, non-male faces, something corrupt in its
denial of our voices. Pat Williams walks over the neutrality to make the
reader see her, hear her-as uncomfortable as it may make readers who
would rather retreat into the impersonal safety of abstraction. There's no
way out of the uncomfortable truths Pat pictures but to walk through
them. If you stop midway through and try to turn back it's already too late:
the picture of the stockbroker sitting across from Pat in the dining car of the
Amtrak train on its way from New York to California saying, in a casual talk
about uprootedness and homelessness, that, although he never gives

' Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
Professor 4 (1991).

2 Id. at 256.
' Id. at 92.

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

anything to the homeless people he sees on the streets of New York, he
always stops to chat with them so that he will not resent their presence, so
that he will not forget their humanity-that picture is already in us, gnaw-
ing away at the forgetting and the forgotten, at where we are standing in
that picture. It's the invisible made visible-the pictures and the conse-
quences.

When I was very young, my grandfather, our family seanchdi, told me
stories of the daoine sidhe, the ancient Celtic gods who love music and
dance and whose only power is transformation. I think this power was the
only one my grandfather wanted and admired too. The sidhe, of course,
could turn you into a chicken if they wanted to (for the sheer laugh of it),
or into a bird (that was the usual story) for the freedom that bestowed. It
was a wondrous thing, the transformation, the freedom, the power of
those stories, and the belief I had while listening to them. It's not easy to
say now what that belief was: perhaps that there was more in this world
than what I could see, that my grandfather had a sort of magic, that the story
and the teller were powerful beings in a way that made my world deeper
and wider as I listened and was able to see beyond my Queens neighbor-
hood to whole neighborhoods of realities that I came from but that I never
would have known without the telling. It is magic, the voice of the story-
teller-an alchemy, as Pat Williams says, that transforms the common into
something wondrous. Such magic should be celebrated as intrinsically
human. Pat does that.

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Working Through Other People's Lives: Patricia Williams'
Alchemy of Race and Rights

G. Patterson*

I can't think that many people have lives interesting enough to war-
rant writing about, much less reading.'

One of the things that I admire most about Patricia Williams' work is
its ferment, the disequilibrium she sees, describes, and plunges into-to find
a way to a new resolution. She teaches us that the Law is not what it was
and is not what it should be. Much thought, discussion, and self-exami-
nation have gone into her book, into her articulation of the phenomena of
race and sex, into delineating the necessity for a new Law and the difficulty
of achieving it. Pat Williams continually disturbs my ideas of law and jus-
tice. I am grateful that her exploration of formal, legal values does not
devolve into hermeticism.

Pat Williams' writing is sprinkled with personal anecdote, family
biography, and cultural history. Her thoughts, her history, her everyday
experiences figure so prominently in her writings that a frequent reader
might easily believe that s/he knows Pat, and great-great-grandmother
Sophie, and great-great-grandfather Austin Miller, and godmother Marjorie.
This is a world so densely populated by the living and the dead and the
imagined that it evades the monumental solipsism, the self-protectiveness
and self-declarativeness of much confessionalism and of half-thought-out
identity politics. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is a clever arrangement of
different voices. The range of sources, the crush of opinions, and the
near-infinite redefinition that occupy this gathering of voices are an admis-
sion and an endorsement of social complexity.

It is not surprising that much of Pat Williams' work concerns the past,
the reconstruction of her family history, the empathetic expansion of

* G. Patterson (A.B. Princeton University, J.D. Stanford Law School) is an asso-
ciate at Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe.

I Comment of a 74-year-old man, after having endured 36 hours of taped
interviews for his biography.

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

personal identity. The repeated efforts in her writings to reconnect delicate,
private lives and the wider, public life reflect a re-membering of self and soc-
ety. Her broad self-presentation becomes an assertion of invitation, of
inclusiveness, encoded into the normally exclusive attentions of formal
analysis.

In the spring of 1988, Patricia Williams visited Stanford Law School to
present the paper which Signs later published as "On Being the Object of
Property."2 The crowd she drew, in the late afternoon, in the middle of the
week, filled the lecture hall. Afterward, as I came to the head of a long line
of listeners who wanted to thank her for speaking, I heard the young man
in front of me say, in greeting, "I really enjoyed your talk. But what did it
mean?"

I was Pat's research assistant during the year that she taught at Stanford
Law School. That was also the year she finished her book, The Alchemy of
Race and Rights. Rather, it was the last year of drafting, and the first year
of editing and rewriting. Everything Pat did during that year seemed
connected to The Book. Everything was a candidate for inclusion in The
Book. I see in The Book the larval shadows of her earlier drafts, of law
school politics, of our morning tea-time conversations.

The Book has a fixed presence in my life and memory. Everything I did
was haunted by The Unborn Book. I see My Last Year in Northern
California marked clearly in The Book. I find in It traces of my own private
activities during that year. I may have mentioned these private activities
to Pat. Certainly, I mentioned most things to her. We became friends
during that year. We shared work and parts of our "private" lives.

For a time, I worried that I would be analyzed and reconfigured in Pat's
writing. I objected to nearly every one of her comments on my work,
knowledge, character, out of fear of an unflattering depiction in a future arti-
cle. What had I done that might suggest that, like S., I too saw sex and gen-
der as grammatical mountings? What did it mean that Pat had crayoned
her motorcar on our matching, color-your-own children's calendars red
while I had crayoned the car green? What would it mean to the hundreds
who would read of it that my face dropped and I sighed sorrowfully upon
seeing the vibrant difference in our views of the world?

2 Patricia J. Williams, On Being the Object of Property, 14 Signs 5 (Autumn,

1988).

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

I keep a journal. For years my entries have been irregular but frequent.
There are fewer entries from September 1988 through August 1989 than for
any other year. I did chronicle some of the anxieties about my imminent
dissection in print. For the other aspects of that year, I rely on memory and,
to an embarrassing extent, on The Book. Though many things have burned
off in the telling, The Alchemy of Race and Rights stands as a diary of my life
in the orbit of a law professor.

The Book can also serve as part of a patchwork diary of the lives of sev-
eral dozen other people-Pat's friends, her acquaintances, her colleagues,
her relatives. The Book is studded with stories from other people's lives.
Other people's lives can easily become decorative when one takes no part
in them. But these lives are not decoration to her. These are not convenient,
real-life hypotheticals and pedagogic illustrations. These are not truly other
lives. They are lives she has entered, to varying depths.

Nor are the guests of Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey simply char-
acters in the fictionalized narrative of a law professor. Theirs are true and
complete lives, only parts of which have been discussed on television.
Very little, if any, of their lives have been incorporated into our public life.
It is this partiality that concerned Pat. The stories in the papers and mag-
azines that promised everything ("The untold story!") but told only a lit-
tle were the ones I was asked to find. Those were the ones she wanted to
rework. "Search for synecdoche," she might have said, except for her
worry that I wouldn't know what "synecdoche" meant or, perhaps, that I
would ask which literary theorist's idea of synecdoche should guide me.

Recently, when asked how it felt to be in her own country after
thirty years of exile, Miriam Makeba said, "I think I'll be even
happier when I can come back to sing before my people, where I'll
not have to explain my songs because they will understand."3

I recall few rough points in my work for Pat. One I do remember con-
cerned the editing comments I had made on a piece which became part of

Singer Back in South Africa, N.Y. Times, June 11, 1990, at 6.

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

"Arm's-Length Intimacies."4 We were sitting in an old coffeehouse in
Palo Alto; I was drinking herbal tea, and Pat was drinking latte. She was
explaining to me the weirdness of seeing blonde, brunette, and red-haired
models-white and black-prancing on a runway to Brazilian music. She
was telling me how odd it felt to watch an invitation dance to consumption
performed to lyrical screams of poverty and oppression. I had made some
comments on the draft about rhythm as universal language, an ur-
Esperanto, and I suggested that Pat's discomfort with the fashion show was
a post-modern discomfort with the amalgamation of styles previously
segregated under Modernity. What she described as imperialistic and col-
onizing, I kept defending as post-modern collage, a Loving v. Virginia mar-
riage of art, commerce, and hemispheres. It was, I said, a praiseworthy
event of visual-musical-cultural sampling. Finally feeling that I had under-
stood her point and that she kept missing mine, I said, "Maybe it's differ-
ent for me because I know Portuguese." Pat said, "I understand Portuguese,
and that's why it seems so wrong to me."

During the time that Pat and I worked together on her book, Allan
Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind,5 and E.D. Hirsch's book,
Cultural Literacy,6 were attracting lots of attention; Stanford University
was debating its Western Culture requirement; the Graywolf Annual V
"Multicultural Literacy"7 was released; I was studying in Stanford's English
Department and translating the Negritude poems of Jacques Roumain.
Everywhere I went, "sampling" and "quoting" were flags of one's allegiance
in the war on the canon. Thanks to David Byrne and Sting, Brazilian
music had passed out of hip and into popularity. In this context, the story
of the fashion show seemed one more tardy celebration of style. It was hard-
ly remarkable. It was, to me, uninteresting and relatively unimportant;
however, if one were going to treat it seriously one had to admit that it
reflected inclusivity more than exclusivity in popular culture. Attack the
fashion show? You might as well surrender the world to Bloom and
Hirsch.

The fashion show sampling-which I took for multicultural defiance-
struck Pat as bombast. As she experienced it (and explained it patiently to
me), the fashion house/retailer was not engaging, or quarreling, with the
segregation of cultural and artistic life. Rather, the show was a demon-

' Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
Professor 202 (1991).

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
'E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987).

Graywolf Press, Graywolf Annual V: Multicultural Literacy (1988).

160 [Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

stration of the power to own another culture. It was an expression of
dominance like that Edward Said saw in the nineteenth- and early twen-
tieth-century European treatment of the Islamic Mideast. The songs were
selected, not for their lyrics, nor for their commentary on the political
and economic situation in Brazil, nor for their "authentic" expression of part
of Brazilian culture. They were selected for their "exoticism," their rhyth-
mic otherness, or, perhaps, for their artistic styling.

Authentic cultural expression cannot be enslaved. Attitudes of own-
ership make for inert quotations. Such a mixing is, at best, a mannerist
anthology. It reflects the aestheticization and neutralization of the moral,
political, and spiritual qualities of the music.

"Art as neutralizing?" I sputtered.
"Yes! Art as a neutralizing, decorative backdrop. Go and find me stuff

on Paul Simon and the Graceland tour."
"Oh, and articles about Sting's Brazilian music?"
"Yes.
"And the French response to Gauguin's early Tahitian paintings?"
"Yes."
"And Picasso's and Matisse's and Derain's use of African masks? The

transmogrification of magic items to sculpture?"
"Yeah."
"Appropriation without comprehension? I think I'm getting it."

The handwritten letter on cream-colored bond paper said how happy
she was to be here and how much she looked forward to getting to know
us. It also said that she was looking for a research assistant, preferably one
with a strong background in post-structuralist literary criticism, and asked
that anyone interested in applying please stop by her office as soon as pos-
sible.

Not bothering to look at a map of the third floor, I turned right at the
top of the stairs and walked the perimeter of the building before reaching
the office door just to the left of the stairwell I had climbed. The door was
open, so I knocked on the door frame and awaited permission to enter the
room. She might have been smoking. She was probably typing on the com-
puter and talking on the telephone. She was nearly always doing one, but
could do them simultaneously, with apparent ease. She finished up quick-
ly, invited me in, and offered me a seat on the long, leather/leatherette sofa
that was opposite her desk.

1992]



162 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law [Vol. 2:1

"I saw your note about a research assistant," I said. "I'm familiar
with post-structuralist criticism, but I have a much stronger background
and interest in structuralism."

"Oh, that's fine," she said. "When can you start?"
"Don't you want to see my resume or CV or something?"
"No, that's fine. The job's yours. If you want to give me one, though,

I'll look at it. Why don't we meet tomorrow morning at 10:30? I have some
things I'd like you to start on right away."

She wasn't in her office the next day at 10:30. Instead, I found a pale
blue sheet of notebook paper taped to the door. I read the apology (a fac-
ulty conference, a Berkeley lecture, or a friend's crisis-some good reason)
and then took it down, staring at the twelve tasks written in her spidery
hand. Twelve things to do. All of them mentioned Tawana Brawley and
rape.



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Jurywoman

Barbara Allen Babcock*

Patricia Williams generally tells us where she was, and often tells
what she was doing-she was in bed reading, at a kitchen table talking, on
a train rushing, in the library preparing, on Fifth Avenue or East Wheelock
Street, at a convention hotel or at Benetton's. To these ordinary moments
and places, she fixes thoughts and visions that transform the locations,
sometimes beyond recognition.

Even transformed, though, the places always start, and usually remain,
as background. The exception is a story where the significance of the
location itself immediately heightens the action. Patricia Williams is argu-
ing a case to a jury, representing consumers against a sausage maker.'

Here is what I see: a slender, brown woman, her voice low and intense,
her hands gracefully carving the air. The courtroom is old, stone and
wood; the spaces (unlike, for instance, that cramped modern facility this
fall at Palm Beach) express the majesty of the law. The jury box is wood pan-
elled, and in it is a real jury of twelve, not some mutant creation of eight
or even six. 2 Twelve people, men and women, of color and white; there are
maintenance men and housewives (oh certainly, for this case, she wanted
housewives). Probably there are no doctors, no corporate executives, and
surely no literary theorists or constitutional lawyers.

Yet Patricia Williams explains both literary theory and constitutional
law to the jury. She tells them that there is

this thing called a sausage-making machine. You put pork and
spices in at the top and crank it up, and ... what comes out on the
other end is a sausage....

* Ernest McFarland Professor of Law, Stanford Law School. In 1972 Professor
Babcock was the first woman appointed to the tenure track at Stanford Law School.
For almost a decade before coming to Stanford, Professor Babcock was a criminal
defense lawyer, conducting jury trials in Washington, D.C. (for six years a Public
Defender). From 1977 to 1979, on leave from Stanford, she was Assistant Attorney
General for the Civil Division in the Carter administration.

' Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
Professor 107-10 (1991).

2 See Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78 (1970) (holding juries of fewer than 12 per-
missible under the Sixth Amendment).

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

One day, we throw in a few small rodents of questionable pedigree
and a teddy bear and a chicken. We crank the machine up and wait
to see what comes out the other end. 3

Her opponent has insisted that if "pig meat and a lot of impurities" came
out, it was in fact "sausage." To this assertion, she responds:

This suit is an attempt to devour the meaning of justice in much the
same way that this machine has devoured the last shred of com-
mon-sense meaning from sausage itself. But the ultimate inter-
pretive choice is yours: will you allow the machine such great
transformative power that everything which goes into it is robbed
of its inherency, so that nonconformity ceases to exist? Or will you
choose ... to allow the product to be so powerful that "sausage"
becomes all-encompassing, so engorged with alternative meaning
as to fill a purposeful machine with ambiguity and undecidabili-
ty? Or will you wave that so-called sausage, sawdust and tiny
claws spilling from both ends, in the face of that machine and
shout: this is not Justice!P

Is this real? Did anyone ever speak in such elevated terms to any
jury? And could it be, as she also writes, that "the sausage maker's
lawyer" objected because there was "too much critical theory in the court-
room"5 ? How about that "smattering of applause" that she says came
from "the gallery"6? This is New York City where there are no courtroom
galleries segregating blacks who silently rise as Atticus Finch passes below.

But I don't want to get into the literality of metaphors or even (for the
lawyers who are the main questioners) the license that allows a story-
teller what might otherwise be a trespass on truth.7 Rather, my subject here,
stirred by Alchemy's jury story and seen from the perspective of my own

3Williams, supra note 1, at 107.
Id. at 108.
Id.
Id. at 109.
My colleague, Janet Halley, engages these questions in their deepest sense

in Truth/Value, 4 Yale J.L. & Feminism 191 (1991). Reviewing Alchemy, she writes
that "Williams insists not on her fidelity to empirical fact but on her role as the maker
of the text before us, indeed as the fabricator of the very self whose authority she
places at stake." Id. at 205. Halley adds that there is a "special challenge" to white
readers whose dilemma is whether we can "probe" Williams' authority without
devaluing her humanity; whether we can assent to her authority without arrogating
to ourselves the role of authorizers who are necessary to her acceptance. Id.

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

work on women's legal history,8 rests on an indisputable fact. In the last
quarter of the twentieth century Patricia Williams, African-American,
great-great-granddaughter of a black slave, argued to a jury.

There is more: she argued on her own terms, in her distinct and indi-
vidual style, to a group from which people of her sex and race were not

excluded. Only a moment ago historically this scene was inconceivable.
When women first wanted to be lawyers their antagonists insisted that the

innovation would destroy the jury system: "Impressionable male jurors
... [would] return a verdict.., without leaving the box" and "the law and
the facts would be simply ignored.""

Not only would women lawyers supposedly cause juries to acquit
the guilty and reward the undeserving, but at the same time the natural
purity and goodness of the women would be undermined by "all the nas-
tiness of the world which finds its way into courts of justice, all the unclean
issues... sodomy, incest, rape, seduction, fornication, adultery,... libel and
slander of sex, impotence, divorce" and many more among "the nameless

catalogue of indecencies."'" The list did not include, however, the excess-
es of sausage making.

Humorously, or so they surely thought, opponents pointed out that the
only antidote to women lawyers' ill influence on fact-finding would be,
most unthinkable of all, to place women on juries. "[Ulpon such a panel

[the lady lawyer's] seductive and persuasive arts would be wasted.""
Women lawyers themselves did not agree. In states where women's suf-
frage did not, as so many assumed it would, automatically carry with it the

opportunity for jury service, women lawyers led the battle for statutory
change. Women urged that among the indicia of full citizenship, jury ser-
vice is second only to voting.2

I I am writing a biography of Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman lawyer

on the Pacific Coast, who joined the Bar in 1878. See Barbara A. Babcock,
Reconstructing the Person: The Case of Clara Shortridge Foltz, in Revealing Lives
131 (Susan Bell & Marilyn Yalom eds., 1990); Barbara A. Babcock, Clara Shortridge
Foltz: "First Woman," 30 Ariz. L. Rev. 673 (1988) [hereinafter "First Woman"];
Barbara A. Babcock, Clara Shortridge Foltz: Constitution-Maker, 66 Ind. L. Rev. 849
(1991).

' Sacramento Union, Jan. 11, 1878, at 2 (cited in "First Woman," supra note 8
at 689 n.80) (relating a typical argument raised when Clara Foltz sought admission
to the California Bar).

'0 Matter of Goodell, 39 Wis. 232, 245-46 (1875) (denying Lavinia Goodell
admission to the Bar).

" Sacramento Union, Feb. 26, 1878, at I (cited in "First Woman," supra note
8, at 689.

12 See, e.g., Florence Allen, Tried and Approved-The Woman Juror, 70
Literary Dig. 46 (Sept. 1921) (Allen was an Ohio judge when she wrote this, among

1992l



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

Today, in every state women have the right to be called to jury ser-
vice. The new hot issue is whether those women who respond may
then be struck because of their gender. This issue has already been
decided for minorities, particularly for blacks, just as the right to serve
on juries at all was first established for minority men and much later for
women. Equal protection of the laws requires that a prosecutor or a civil
litigant's lawyer must give a reason other than race for dismissing
Hispanic or African-American men from the jury panel. 3

The ban against unexplained racially based strikes arose because in
hundreds of courtrooms over many years prosecutors struck all the
members of the defendant's own race from the jury. The repetition of this
scene became more than our system could bear. But once the Supreme
Court required prosecutors to explain their challenges of racial minori-
ties, the question became where the doctrine would stop. So far, the Court
has held that the defendant may object to the striking of minorities
generally, and not just those like himself'4 and that civil litigants as
well as criminal defendants may call for an explanation of the plaintiff's
attorney's strikes. 5 This term the question is whether criminal defen-
dants must also account for their peremptories. 16

In the near future, the Court must also decide whether female poten-
tial jurors as a class are entitled to the same equal protection as racial
minorities. This next case will probably arise from a trial in which a
lawyer offers gender as his non-racial reason for a strike-most of the
cases dealing with the issue thus far have involved peremptories exer-
cised against minority women." Take, for example, Patricia Williams'
case and transpose its jury selection to the present. The sausage maker's
lawyer uses one of his peremptory challenges to remove a black woman
from the jury. When Williams objects, he tells the judge: "I did not
strike her because she is African-American, but because she is a woman.

many other articles. Later she was the first woman appointed to a federal circuit
court); Women as Jurors, 7 Va. L. Reg. (n.s.) 634 (1921) (Annette Abbot Adams,
first woman Assistant Attorney of the United States; Florence Allen; and others);
Burnita S. Matthews, The Woman Juror, 15 Women Law. J. 15 (April 1927)
(Matthews was later the first woman federal district judge in Washington,
D.C.); Grace H. Harte, Women Jurors and the American Scene, 25 Women Law.
J. 9 (Jan. 1939) (calling on women lawyers to fight for jury duty for women).

11 Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986); Hernandez v. New York, 111 S.
Ct. 1859 (1991).

" Powers v. Ohio, 111 S. Ct. 1364 (1991).
'5 Edmonson v. Lessville Concrete Co., 111 S. Ct. 2077 (1991).
"'McCollum v. Georgia, No. 91-372 (Sup. Ct. argued Feb. 26,1992).

See, e.g., U.S. v. Hamilton, 850 F.2d 1038 (4th Cir. 1988); U.S. v. Nichols,
937 F.2d 1257 (5th Cir. 1991); U.S. v. De Gross, 913 F.2d 1417 (9th Cir. 1990)
(rehearing en banc held and opinion pending).

166 [Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

My client and I believe women are irrational on the subject of food
purity, and we know women stick together."

Who loses-and what exactly do they lose-if the strike of the

potential juror stands? What do the two African-American women,

the potential juror and Patricia Williams, lose? Is this loss different
from the loss to women as a class of citizens? Are there losses to the jury
itself in its deliberations, to the litigants in the acceptability of the deci-
sion, to the justice system and society itself in ways beyond measure?

When the Supreme Court reaches such questions they will probably
hold that the explanation for striking a minority woman must be truly
neutral, not based on either gender or racial stereotypes. Whether the

Court will also find that unexplained dismissals of white women violate
equal protection and what it all means for the future of the peremptory
challenge are the questions of our present. 8 Questions notable because:

until women were lawyers
until women could vote
until women served on juries with minority men
until a black woman could speak to a jury about sausage-justice,
there were no such questions.

18 Long before Batson, whose result I applaud, I wrote about how peremp-

tories allow lawyers to avoid open trafficking in stereotypes. Barbara A.
Babcock, Voir Dire: Preserving its "Wonderful Power," 27 Stan. L. Rev. 545
(1975). Obviously, requiring extended explanations for challenges would destroy
this function for the peremptory. I am also concerned that administering a sys-
tem of rationalized challenges may become so burdensome that the ancient
practice of peremptories will be abolished altogether. This abolition may be a
major loss to criminal defendants at a time when a jury trial is becoming the first
and last bastion against an unjust conviction.

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

Perspective Scholarship and Its Audience:
Who Is This Story For?

Michael Peirce*

Over the past decade we have witnessed the rise and establishment of
a particular style of legal writing known as perspective scholarship.
Although this approach to scholarship assumes many different forms, it is
generally characterized by the use of personal experiential accounts and
insights to critically explore legal and socio-political issues. Perspective
scholarship often includes explicit moments of narrative, though it may be
informed simply by an acknowledged underlying narrative not directly
incorporated into the work.

This type of writing has been effectively used by disempowered peo-
ples to challenge traditional norms that underlie oppressive laws and
legal institutions within our legal system. An important assumption of this
scholarship is that the experience of disempowerment in its particular
manifestations-race discrimination, sexual harassment and rape, homo-
phobia and gay and lesbian bashing, etc.-provides special insight into the
ubiquitous problem of disempowerment and the appropriate legal
responses to that problem. As Mari Matsuda explains:

[Tihose who have experienced discrimination speak with a special
voice to which we should listen. Looking to the bottom-adopting
the perspective of those who have seen and felt the falsity of the lib-
eral promise--can assist critical scholars in the task of fathoming the
phenomenology of law and defining the elements of justice....

The method of looking to the bottom can lead to concepts of law
radically different from those generated at the top.'

The Alchemy of Race and Rights stands out as a distinguished example
of perspective scholarship. Williams marshals literary theory, anecdotal

* Associate in Law, Columbia University School of Law, B.A. (Toronto), LL.B.
(Western Ontario), LL.M. (Wisconsin), J.S.D. candidate (Columbia).

' Mari J. Matsuda, Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and
Reparations, 22 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 323, 324, 326 (1987).

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

storytelling, legal analysis, and deeply personal reflection to challenge
our perception of the dominant norms within the law and our society.
She exposes the racism lurking behind assumptions which inform some of
our most important legal rights, yet she somehow resuscitates the embat-
tled notion of rights in the process. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is a crit-
ical project steeped in everyday life and other-worldly reflections that
has a powerful effect on the way we approach the law.

I have known Pat Williams for about three years, and having read The
Alchemy of Race and Rights during its creation and again after its publica-
tion, I decided to write a review to introduce it to a Canadian audience.2

Shortly after sending off my review, a terrible thought came rushing into
my mind, dashing any feeling of accomplishment. I suddenly realized
that my entire review assumed the perspective of a white male. In one
sense, I could not have written from any other perspective since I am a white
man; however, I mean something more than that. I did not consider the way
my own personal experience as a white man might animate my examina-
tion and assessment of The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Instead, I univer-
salized my life experience by unquestioningly assuming that (sympathetic)
readers of the book would read it just as I did. That is the white male per-
spective: the universalization of one's life experience as a member of the
dominant and dominating culture.

As an author writing a review, I discovered that I had written from a
single viewpoint as though it were the only one. Having read and thought
about so many of the articles addressing the role of perspective in schol-
arship, I should have known better.3 It is far too easy for members of the
dominant culture to understand these articles as a call for greater diversity
of perspectives in the legal literature while failing to recognize them as a
challenge to the possibility of perspectiveless scholarship.

As a reviewer reading The Alchemy of Race and Rights, I had imposed the
white male perspective by assuming a certain experience on the part of
other readers. This assumption is all too common among members of the
dominant culture. Realizing the inappropriateness of my presumption
about Pat's audience, I began to think about who might actually make up
that audience and what significance this makeup might have. I moved from
my concern about the perspective of an author to the issue of the relevance
of the reader. This issue treads on relatively unexplored territory in law,
and I can only hint at the implications of such an inquiry in these few pages.

2 Michael Peirce, A Review of The Alchemy of Race and Rights, 5 Can. J. Women
& L. (forthcoming 1992).

3 See, e.g., Symposium, 87 Mich.. L. Rev. 2073 (1989).

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

As I wondered about whether Pat had a particular audience in mind
when she wrote the book, I began to reflect back on our conversations dur-
ing its writing and editing. Although Pat was extremely busy teaching her
courses and speaking to faculty and students around the country while writ-
ing it, we often managed to discuss her manuscript over lunch. I remem-
ber that we talked about how to rearrange and rewrite the first chapter or
two in order to make the book more accessible to a nonlegal audience or an
audience perhaps unfamiliar with her unique writing style. Pat's con-
cerns went beyond just trying to ensure the coherence of her book; she clear-
ly had some conception of who might read her work and how they would
understand it. I could see that she was plainly conscious of her audience.

Along with technical details about how to arrange or express certain
concepts, we also discussed the substantive content of many chapters.
Pat appeared to be genuinely interested in my thoughts about different
ideas in her book. She talked to me and asked my opinions in a way that
indicated that she had someone like me in mind as a potential member of
her audience. I do not mean to suggest that The Alchemy of Race and Rights
was written for white men, but I do think that Pat intended to communi-
cate with the whites and men that she recognized would be among her read-
ership. She was also undoubtedly hoping to communicate with people
having a variety of other life experiences. As a result, she wrote her book
with an understanding that her audience would consist of a multiplicity of
perspectives. Having recognized this fact at the outset, she wrote in a
way that seems to communicate directly with each reader. The Alchemy of
Race and Rights is like a painting in which the eyes appear to each person
to be looking right at them wherever they are standing in the room.

What we see in the work of Patricia Williams is true of other perspec-
tive scholarship. People using this approach must be aware of their audi-
ence in a way that those writers producing traditional legal scholarship are
not. Conventional law articles are written from the white male perspective,
which conceives of itself as the only, and therefore universal, viewpoint.4

By definition these articles are unreflectively written for a white male
audience. In contrast, perspective scholars, by recognizing a multiplicity
of experiences and views, commit themselves to accounting for the diver-
sity of perspectives among their readers. This commitment is an inescapable

4 There are, of course, factors beyond the self-universalizing impetus of the
white male perspective which help to explain the constant use of this perspective
throughout conventional legal scholarship. One is the inertia stemming from the
fact that legal scholarship was traditionally written only for white men because only
white men were admitted to the academy. It is also likely that some legal academics
desire to communicate only with white men.

[Vol. 2:1170



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

extra responsibility faced by scholars engaged in perspective writing; it also
makes their work much richer as they carefully weave more layers into the

fabric of their writing to be able to speak to the diverse members of their

audience.
The solution to this burden of the extra responsibility of audience

awareness faced by perspective scholars is not an easing of that burden, but

rather an equal distribution of it among all legal scholars. Conventional
legal scholars must begin to recognize their own situated perspectives

and those of their audience. This necessity is true in everyday life as well

as in academic writing. The burden of constant audience awareness is

something that women, people of color, gay men, and lesbians face through-
out their lives. In contrast, those people assuming the white male per-

spective, oblivious to their audience, frequently make racially derogatory,
homophobic, and sexist comments. Sexual harassment is an archetypal
example of this problem. Although often committed intentionally, sexu-

al harassment is also frequently the result of men speaking to women in sex-

ual or sexually explicit ways as though women shared the same sexual
perspective as men. But they don't. Women's life experiences are differ-
ent from men's, so that sexual comments and touching are experienced as
harassment and not ego gratification.-

As with scholarly audience awareness, we should distribute the need

for everyday audience awareness equally. This distribution does not
mean, though, that men should respond to the issue of sexual harassment
by censoring their speech only when they are with women. Instead, they

should always speak with honesty and respect. It is a rather simple formula:
to speak to everyone in the same way is to be honest; to speak in a way that
is appropriate for all to hear is to show respect for others' dignity. To speak
without both honesty and respect is simply wrong.

Members of the dominant culture constantly assume the objectivity of

their experience and impose that assumption in ways that damage those
people whose lives are forged from different perspectives. In The Alchemy

of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams exposes some of the damage inflicted

by the assumption of perspectivelessness and shows us the importance of

- It is important to recognize that sexual harassment is not just an issue which
is constructed differently by people with differing perspectives. Rather (men's) lack
of awareness and understanding of other perspectives is the legal issue in sexual
harassment. Such harassment specifically results from the failure of men to rec-
ognize the implications of the diversity of perspectives among their audience-those
people who hear, feel, and suffer their sexual remarks and advances. The fact that
women and men have different perspectives does not cause sexual harassment; it
is men's ignorance of this diversity of perspectives that results in such harassment.

1992]



172 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law [Vol. 2:1

and potential for trying to understand and respect a multiplicity of per-
spectives. She does so while maintaining an understanding and respect for
her diverse audience. As a result, both through her words and through her
actions, Patricia Williams shows us how to manage this same skill in
rethinking our laws and in living our lives.



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Select Journal Entries on Entry Fee for Inclusion

Dinesh Khosla*

The Alchemy of Race and Rights brought back wonderful memories of my
association with Patricia Williams. I first met Pat in the summer of 1984
when she came to the City University of New York Law School, CUNY, to
be part of a new and bold experiment in legal education, an experiment that
was barely a year old. I was not at CUNY when Pat arrived there. The
untimely death of my father had taken me back home to India. Upon my
return, I was anxious to talk with my new colleague, with whom I was slat-
ed to teach a course on Law in a Market Economy. Within a few minutes
of our first meeting we were talking about the complex issues of our iden-
tities and the forces that had shaped our beings. Discussing who we were,
who we are, and what might we become was not the usual conversation that
precedes the planning of a course for law school. But that is what we found
ourselves doing. Not surprisingly, the course, as it finally developed,
was shaped in very profound ways by that and other conversations that we
had on related issues of market and non-market economies, individual
worth, tension between culturally defined identity and individual accom-
plishment-oriented identity, fairness and unconscionability as perceived in
divergent cultural milieus, etc.'

I was never uncomfortable telling Pat my experiences in and around
law schools-none of which, she would often say, destroyed or distorted
the essence of my being. I have never been sure of that myself. Private
expressions and sharing of the experiences of my life with Pat made it com-
fortable for me to share them with the larger community. What follows are
a few experiences relating to our conversations about becoming a law
teacher in the United States.!

* Visiting Teacher of Law at Touro Law School, on leave from CUNY Law
School, New York.

' See, e.g., Dinesh Khosla & Patricia Williams, Economies of Mind: A
Collaborative Reflection, 10 Nova L. Rev. 621 (1986).

2 This piece is a modified version of my speech three years ago on the day when
law students throughout the country demanded that law school administrations
diversify the faculty.

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

October 1976: New Haven

Ten thousand miles away from home, in the midst of an alien culture,
sitting in the oak panelled office of one of the Deans at the Law School, I am
having a very pleasant conversation about my experiences in New Haven.
The conversation turns to the social ecology that surrounds our lives. I
express my disbelief about the poverty-stricken lives that surround the
ivy-laced gothic structures of Yale. Before I finish my statement, I find that
we are talking about poverty in India, and I hear a statement about the Law
School's commitment (generosity?) to provide scholarships and education
to the students from the third world. I feel a compulsion to thank my
provider, provider of my scholarship. I want to tell him about the Indian
conception of Vishva Kutumb, one world and world as one family. I want to
talk about our responsibility to improve social ecology and human condi-
tions. The Dean continues to talk about the large number of third world
scholars Yale has trained. After a while, I begin to feel as if I am the blessed
recipient of charity. Must I thank again? Had I spread my hands asking for
alms? I am hurt and confused. Hierarchies prevent each one of us from lis-
tening to the other. I pause. I want to tell him the story of Elihu Yale, for-
mer Governor of South India, who received rare books and artifacts from
the Indian citizens he ruled. (Indians believed that they were obligated to
give those items as "gifts.") The Governor in turn gifted those valuables to
the Collegiate School, which netted over 562 British pounds selling those
items. In gratitude, the trustees renamed the Collegiate School and called
it Yale College. My inability to tell him the story makes me angry with
myself. I am shaking. I do not have eye contact with the provider of my
scholarship. I want to terminate the facade of conversation. I want to tell
him that Yale owes us not only these scholarships but much more. The schol-
arships don't even equal the accumulated simple interest on the money that
came from India. I want to tell him, let us rename Yale and call it the
University of South India in New Haven. I want to ask him how is this aca-
demic heaven "new" or different from the others I have known? I want to
tell him that the price you extract from me when you include me in your fold
and open the gates of the school for me is too heavy-you push me to
react in ways that are in total conflict with who I am. I want to think of all
of us as part of one family, one world but you push me to think in terms of
us and them-those from the first world and those others from the third
world. The meeting ends. Both of us have other important things to do.

May 1980: Four Years Later

I now have earned a masters and a doctorate degree from Yale Law
School. Less than a dozen people earn a doctorate in law every year

[Vol. 2:1174



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

throughout the country, I am told. As the recipient of the highest degree
in law, I have been asked to lead the graduation procession. I do. I am hon-
ored and confused. The pockets of my jacket are bulging with rejection let-
ters from law schools all over the country. Most tell me that despite my
wonderful background (two LL.M.s, a doctorate in law, an M.Phil. in soci-
ology, teaching experience, and a soon-to-be-published book on human
rights) I do not fit their needs. That I am overqualified. Should I lead the
graduation procession and celebrate my overqualification? During the
course of the wonderful congratulatory speeches of the graduation speak-
ers, I want to get up and scream:

Don't you, the bastions of capitalistic-oriented preaching and
teaching of law, understand that in hiring me as a law teacher you
will get someone more qualified for the same or perhaps less
money than you would have to pay to someone less qualified?
. .. If you hire me, you will be true to the capitalistic values of get-
ting more for less.... At least, for God's sake, be true to yourselves.

Of course, I smile with every congratulation that comes my way. Upon
reflection, I now understand why you don't hire me. In the green you might
have saved in hiring me, you saw the color brown-the color of my skin.

February 1981: Somewhere in the Midwest

I have the possibility of getting a job offer. I want it badly.
Unemployment is painful. It is doubly painful with a Yale diploma, I
think. Over the sunny-side-up eggs and biscuits breakfast, the Dean tells
me that the school is committed to hiring minorities and that I will be their
first one, if things work out. Sunny side is no longer visible to me. It is dark,
despite the fact that the icy white of the eggs that has covered the entire
landscape is all that I can see. I can't accept being a token. You can't put
me in a slot. What about my over-qualifications? What about me as a
human being who loves to teach? What about me as a scholar who has even
published a book and several articles in a language that is not his own? I
imagine emphatically saying NO, NO, NO. I know a "no" doesn't get you
anywhere in a society which expects one to conform. As expected, I did not
get the offer. You, the gatekeepers of the institutions that profess fairness
and equal opportunity, wanted me to reduce my mother-nature-given
humanness to a category of your creation ("minorities") before you would
admit me to the somewhat exclusive club known as "Professors of Law."
Shame on you for asking me to soak my colorless soul in the color brown,
the color of my skin.

1992] 175



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

October 1981: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Finally, I have a job as a law teacher. The faculty hiring season is
upon us. The faculty is meeting to discuss the needs of the school.
International Trade is mentioned as one. I suggest the name of a visiting
Iranian Professor at Princeton, an author of two books. I am interrupted
by a senior colleague. "We don't want more foreigners. . . ." "You have
a point," I want to say. "There are too many of us foreigners here at this
school ... actually all of us ... let's leave the school to the Seminole
Indians of Southern Florida." Why did I not say what was on my mind?

November 1983: Oueens, New York

Five months after the founding of the City University of New York Law
School-the school that was expected to revolutionize legal education,
dismantle hierarchies, and introduce self-reflection on the process of
becoming a lawyer as a key component of legal education-I have received
a request to redo a form for my personnel file. Didn't I fill it out in June,
I ask? "Yes, you did," I am told, "but it was not done properly." "What was
wrong with it? Did I misstate something?" I ask. "Yes, the column on Race,"
comes the reply. I don't want to spend too much more time on the tele-
phone. If I can't see the face of the person with whom I am conversing, I
get uncomfortable. I promise to send the form after filling it in properly.
I do. Ten days later, I get it back. Am I so stupid that I can't even fill out
a damn form? Don't I know my race? I ask these questions to myself. I am
told by one of the deans that the computer does not recognize the "new"
category by which I described myself. How ironic! All I had said in
response to the question on race of applicant was-Human race. How was
that category new? And who gives a damn whether or not the computer
recognizes that description or not? The Associate Dean wants to know how
he should count me for the purpose of filling out some forms on affirma-
tive action. I am tired. I tell him to do what he wishes to do. My father had
always taught me to recognize but look beyond culturally defined cate-
gories to universalistic values and categories. Why do you, you the
bureaucrats, want me to redefine myself to fit your little forms and orga-
nizational charts? Who the hell do you think you are anyway?

November 1987: The Mosaic City of Diversity-New York

I am invited by a middle-ranked law school to interview with them. I
am excited. I have been at Ivy League and no league schools. I have been

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

at CUNY, the separate league school. Maybe I will make it to the middle
league school-finally part of Main Street, U.S.A. I walk into the interview
room. No one except the only woman, an Afro-American, stands up to greet
and welcome me. I hear several voices speaking about how impressed they
are with my credentials, my books, my having survived the tenure battle
at CIJNY. I am very comfortable. After a while I am asked what an ideal
course on human rights would look like. The people of Palestine seeking
self-determination, the homeless of New York, the hungry of India and
Bangladesh, the humiliations of those who dare to be different, the abused
children and women, the Native Americans, the discarded elderly, the
unattended sick, the silence of untenured professors at the law schools, the
experiences of terrorized students in many law school classrooms-the
deprivations of all kinds and how to eradicate them is what I would want
to teach. There is silence and discomfort in the room. My instinct tells me
that I have blown a chance to move up to a more "prestigious" law school.

,The interview ends. Two of my friends, both with a Critical Legal Studies
orientation, call me to tell me how sorry they are that I won't be teaching
at their law school. I am still waiting to hear from the faculty hiring com-
mittee. I know I would have been offered the job, had I maintained silence
and not expressed my concern for all those forgotten people seeking
respect and dignity whom I had mentioned. The price you (the commit-
tee) asked me to pay for moving up in the hierarchy of law schools was
silence., How ironic, because you never stop talking; you never stop pro-
fessing that freedom of thought and expression is the most cherished
value you hold. Shame on you, the preachers. But thank you too. I think
you prevented me from becoming a part of that hierarchy that I so violently
want to reject.'

1983-91: Eight Years at My Second Home--CUNY Law School

Eight years of joy and frustration; accomplishments and failures;
beginning to know ourselves, individually and as a collective, yet never
pushing beyond certain boundaries. I want to celebrate the apparent vis-
ible diversity, but I cannot. I am not sure if I have, if we have, dismantled
our biases. We used to work on recognizing them, questioning them
through processes of self and collective reflections. Why did we stop
doing that? Was it no longer safe to do so? Had we turned up enough of
the soil of our souls to make us afraid of ourselves? Or was it, plain and
simple, ineffective in changing us? I am saddened by the fact that we, as
an institution, are less diverse compared to the beginning years, and I am
deeply troubled that it has happened while I have been here. Why did I not
do enough to prevent the slide?

1992] 177



178 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law [Vol. 2:1

Why do we not welcome and tolerate the diversity of opinions and
views in manners similar to the earlier days of our existence as an insti-
tution? Why have we started to impose silence on our colleagues and stu-
dents? What happened to the idea of all of us being part of a family,
sharing the pains and celebrating the joys? I can't explain all these dis-
turbing trends by dumping them on the very nature of academic bureau-
cracies and institutional realities. I am part of that process. I often ask
myself whether there has been a massive invasion of my soul by the very
forces against which my soul wanted to, and at times did, revolt. Has that
invasion chiseled away or distorted the very essence of my being? Where
is the conception of the new we Patricia Williams is hoping for in the
Alchemy?



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Mambru se fue a la Guerra (The Personal Is
Political, or Vice Versa?)

Celina Romany*

I am not exactly a fan of induced psychological associations. I have a
visceral antagonism towards the association game, perhaps because it is
about surrendering control to someone who hopes to dissect my psyche and
come up with an "objective" interpretation of me. In order to play the game,
I need to feel safe. Patricia's work is about those safe harbors. She holds
up a familiar and comforting mirror that encourages me to walk the path
of associations.

Take, for instance, my recent work. I have been obsessing about foun-
dations from within an academic world that is increasingly destroying them.
In my quest to genealogize feminist and race theory from a critical per-
spective, personal experience becomes a key tool in the unraveling of the
liberal self.

Patricia talks about multi-faceted invisibility. The self who attends a sold-
out performance of the social contract saga comes to mind. The shallow pond for
a floating feminist theory that persists in compartmentalized subordination.
Only by showing the centrality of experience in which political and cultural his-
tory is deeply connected to the constitution of a subject born into a context of per-
sonal and social delegitimation can a feminist theory of subjectivity adequately
elaborate an alternative vision to the liberal self.

Patricia weaves critical strands of race theory with feminist legal the-
ory to launch her attack on liberal notions of fairness and rights. The cri-
tiques of critiques are in order. Critical race theorists' critique of critical legal
studies' critique of rights comes to mind. A critique of rights that stems, not from
what a critical legal scholar would describe as an alienating experience originat-
ing from the fear of connection, nor from what a feminist legal scholar would char-
acterize as a gender experience of connection that spells solidarity and responsibility
to others in lieu of atomized individualism. The intersection of race and gender
pointing to a different legal consciousness.

* Celina Romany is an Associate Professor of Law at City University of New
York Law School and is currently a Schell Fellow/International Human Rights at
Yale Law School.

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

Patricia talks about the pirouettes of connection and separation. I think

of rights tracing boundaries of mutual respect-in-separation, which (giving a recess
to "disruptive" false consciousness) can transform a position of "objective" non-iden-
tity. I think of a self that is provided a strong sense of identity(ies) by a social sys-
tem that recognizes and nurtures the respect for differences and offers the material
conditions for their full realization. Cultural distance comes to mind. That distance
which eludes premature engagements with others and which brings about assimi-
lation and/or co-optation. The cultural separation which a culturally situated self
needs in order to breathe the transformative potential of intersubjectivity.

Patricia talks about individuality and collectivity. I keep thinking of dis-
tance and separation outside of the solipsistic orbit. The orbit that springs from
the recognition of one's cultural collectivity and cultural self-sovereignty, resem-
bling what Iris Young describes as a "being-together of strangers," as relations "in
the sense of an understanding of groups and cultures that are different, with
exchanging and overlapping interactions that do not issue in community, yet which
prevent them from being outside of one another."'

Patricia talks about her personal experience as a law teacher.
Associations travel full speed when we approach life in legal academia. Resistance
movements against footnote status in legal discourse and practice, in the most orna-
mented discourse of power. Tactics and strategies deployed against Master
scripts, truths, methodologies, pedagogies, tenure standards ....

Judge Maxine Thomas, Patricia narrates, was found by her clerk
"curled into fetal position, crying in her chambers.. . , singing her small
songs, magic words, soothsayings of comfort and the inky juice of cuttle-
fish.. ., the songs of meadow saffron and of arbor vitae, of eel serum and
marking nut, snowberry, rue-bitterwort, and yew."2 In a car that slides
from aesthetically-deprived Queens into aesthetically-rich Manhattan, I find
myself singing Mambrg se fue a la Guerra, that children's tune which connects
my current fragmented self to the whole-stronger childhood self born and raised
in a Puerto Rican neighborhood where we were pretty much the same and North-
Americans were the others in our occupied country. Mambri se fue a la guer-
ra, que dolor, que dolor que pena, Mambrl se fue a la guerra, no se cuando
vendra, do, re mi, do re fa, no si cuando vendra ... Mambr se fue a la guer-
ra, facing that colleague or student who skates through that slippery slope of
praise/condescension that translates her amazement at a Puerto Rican law professor
(yes, Pat, our life as oxymorons) who is teaching Jurisprudence instead of clean-
ing the windows or baby-sitting her child, who most likely will have a solid foun-

Iris M. Young, The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference, 12 Soc.
Theory & Prac. 1, 21-22 (1986).

2 Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law

Professor 197 (1991).

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

dation in Spanish by the age of three. Que dolor que pena, Mambrd se fue a la
guerra, to find a dean advising her to complete her J.S.D., since having taught for
twelve years and having tenure in Puerto Rico are not good enough credentials for
tenure-in-USA. An academic-life version of tenure in the colonized worlds.

Patricia's accounts of substance and form in legal academia: exams, stu-
dents' reactions to unorthodox teaching. A gypsy, in Romany, reads my
palm and describes my repeated characterizations of legal standards as "la
migra"l guarding the borders of creativity, compassion, empathy, and visionary
thought; my attempts at creating a room with a great view of narratives about inter-
sections that challenge the suspect character of suspect classifications which fail
to acknowledge the high correlations between race, gender, and poverty; or the right
of employers to dismiss at will based on master-servant scripts hidden behind the
veil of contract freedom; or the canonization of property in employment discrim-
ination, which elevates management prerogatives to the rank of natural law and
which, in the labor relations scenario, grants workers the right to strike subject to
permanent replacement, a euphemistic description of dismissal; the narratives
underlying the principles and doctrines of immigration laws and political asylum,
which cause latino workers (farm workers in particular) to experience post-
modern forms of slavery in the workplace and which sanction double standards to
measure political repression in Latin American vis d vis Europe; or the myopic
blindness that inheres in reverse discrimination claims; that reasonable man
standard in self-defense cases which does not grasp the experience of battered women
living a hellish existence; definitions of human rights which stay at the civil/polit-
ical arena and don't venture into the deep waters of social and economic devel-
opment, including the "private" world of women subject to violence; or basic
customary norms of international law, which don't find a meaningful place in our
constitutional framework-to mention a few examples.

Patricia's great-great-grandmother Sophie. Close encounters with same-
ness and differences at the margins, the similar and different experiences of plan-
tations/haciendas inhabited by chattels, a legacy of the Conquistadores being
commemorated in the Quincentennial of the "Discovery" of America.

Associations at the border of the intellect and the psyche just happen.
One afternoon, surrounded by Marjorie's presence in Patricia's apart-
ment, we spoke about Pedro Albizu Campos. Albizu Campos, the most
respected voice of Puerto Rican consciousness, found in Pat's relatives a
shelter of love and support for the particularly cruel isolation that he
breathed while an "oxymoron" (a brilliant, Puerto Rican, poor, and mulat-
to student) in the Harvard of 1914. A powerful association in the chain of
associations that has made me apprehend Patricia's work in that unique
space where the personal is truly political, or vice versa?

' "La migra" is the name latinos have for immigration officials at the borders.

19921



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

On Identity: The Golden Years
On Communication: From Voice Mali to Footnotes'

Bill (not William) Ong Hing*

Her daughter was turning two that Saturday, and Susan was looking
forward to sharing the moment with the people with whom she worked at
Golden Gate University Law School. So she invited a few other faculty sec-
retaries, and perhaps eight to ten faculty members for whom she did work
from time to time. I'm not sure exactly how most of the law school folks
responded to the invitation-it's likely that some were uncomfortable at the
prospect of going to such an event. After all, Susan, a Filipina immigrant,
lived in the San Francisco Mission District in a small apartment with her
husband, their daughter, and her husband's parents. Susan had also made
it clear that the event was to be mostly a family celebration for her two-year-
old. Susan's life was very different from the lives of the other secretaries,
and certainly different from the lives of faculty members. Most of the peo-
ple with whom she worked regarded her as socially awkward, and many
thought her Tagalog-accented English was hard to understand.

When Saturday came, only three law school folks showed-Pat, Al, and
me, all faculty members. Al was a Jewish man in his sixties-a noted
labor lawyer who had turned to full-time teaching later in life than the rest
of us. Although Al and his wife seemed a little uncomfortable, they were
nice and appeared genuinely happy to be there. I was fine, too, I suppose.
After all, good food-of which there was an abundance-generally brings
out the best in me. Then Pat, fresh from her morning jazz dance class, eased
in to join us. Yes, Pat, the articulate, deep, prim and proper intellectual, slid
right in with a Debbie Allen-like flow,' fitting in, making folks feel

* Associate Professor, Stanford Law School.
Dear Pat: It seems that in the past year or so we've been playing phone tag-

communicating principally by leaving and listening to messages on our respective
answering machines and voice mail. I've decided to use footnotes this time, espe-
cially since convention has it that communicating a separate story through footnotes
in law reviews is standard. Besides, I'm in my element these days when it comes
to footnotes and endnotes; they've consumed much of my life recently, after
Stanford Press ordered me to convert about 2,000 footnotes from law review for-
mat to that of the Chicago Manual of Style.

2 I'm sorry I wasn't the first to tell you soon after you started taking your dance
classes that you reminded me of Debbie Allen. I do recall how flattered you were
when students mentioned it to you. I agreed.

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

comfortable, talking with Susan's cousins, aunts, and uncles, making like
home.

Sea Ranch was absolutely gorgeous. A bit windy, but we were sur-
rounded by clear, blue skies, mountains, and the ocean. The setting was
perfect for an end-of-the-semester grading fest for the faculty "liberals." It
was a chance to be together for a few days-to go through the agony of
grading exams together, to cook and eat together, to sing together, to joke
together, to hot tub together. I think there were seven or eight of us there
that spring. By then, Pat had accepted a "visitorship" at CUNY for the fol-
lowing academic year, although we all knew that she'd be leaving the
"Gate" permanently. We also all knew that those of us who were
untenured-Pat, Dru, and I-would soon be getting our one-year notices
of termination due to the school's budget crisis.'

Driving up to Sea Ranch, I didn't think I was in the mood for gaiety, but
I surprised myself soon after arriving. My change in attitude had every-
thing to do with Pat being there. She was joking, in good spirits, at ease.
By then, we were the only people of color on the faculty,4 but the folks we
were with were good. The time was productive, and we had a lot of
laughs-quite enjoyable after all. After a couple of days, I returned to San
Francisco, leaving the others to continue. A few days later, when I ran into
Pat back at school, I wanted to be filled in on the day or so that I had missed.
As she told me how it had been fine but that after I had left it had been much
less fun for her, I realized that she had relied upon me perhaps as much as
I upon her for the ability to be open, ourselves, and free.'

For some reason, these two events stand out in my mind when I think
of Pat Williams and the time we shared together on the same faculty.

I suppose you could say that those of us who got notice that summer even-
tually landed on our feet. You of course not only landed on your feet, but then
bounced to several higher levels. Getting laid off together is a strong bond that will
likely hold you, Dru, and me together forever.

The faculty's failure to promote Rosella the year before was deflating for me
as well as for you. It was my first real bitter taste of faculty hypocrisy. Another was
the letter found in the xerox machine, signed by most of the tenured faculty, urg-
ing the dean to let all the untenured faculty go in order to ease budget problems,
although they had assured us that they supported us.

I As the only two people of color on the faculty at the time, I was really
touched by your words after Sea Ranch. You should realize that during my.
"notice" year, when you were at CUNY, I was pretty miserable.

19921



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

Perhaps it's because when I read Pat Williams-when her sense of identi-
ty, her sense of self, her sense of being an African American woman are so
clear-I realize that even back at Golden Gate, during what might mock-
ingly be labelled the "Golden Years," she began to influence my own
sense of self and identity. Back then, Pat occasionally mentioned her per-
sonal journal and the "hefty" entries that she regularly took the time to
make. "Far out!" I thought, little knowing that these journal entries would
soon form the basis for many of her articles and for The Alchemy of Race and
Rights.6 And what writings they've been! When I first read her published
work, I recognized a journal-like style-a style that captured my imagi-
nation and my attention, refusing to allow me to put the work down,
much as one reacts to a captivating novel.'

Such a sense of identity is important for scholars of color. For many of
us, the identification of "scholar of color" is something that has been foist-
ed upon us. Some people may resist this type of pigeonholing. But, at least
for now, the labeling continues, and it might be wiser to follow a Tai Chi
principle of resistance-first going with the flow, then turning the energy
back in full circle and in full force. I think Pat Williams has done just that.

I generally think of myself as Asian American rather than Chinese
American.' But that may have something to do with the fact that I was born
in the United States; most of my friends of Asian ancestry (Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, and Filipino) are also American-born or have lived here
most of their lives; I communicate with these friends in English; and,
while we may not always look at things the same way, we share many
common life experiences. I also work in a university environment where
"Asian American" is a common label and the vast majority of my Asian
American co-workers and students are American-born Japanese and
Chinese Americans. I have been a member of many political and social

6 I recall that during your last year at Golden Gate you and I were two of the
first faculty members to begin using computer word processors. So somewhere
along the line you converted your journal entries to pixels. I confess that I had a
little chuckle about your discussion in Alchemy as I pictured you in your bed with
your laptop computer writing about Harvard's ridiculous announcement that
they were unable to find a qualified African American woman for the faculty. I
chuckled because I am sure that even before the days of laptops, you stretched your
keyboard to your bed in order to blast away.

As you were blasting away on your first-generation personal computer, I
wonder if you realized you were developing a spellbinding style that many friends
and students have told me reminds them of Toni Morrison's.

' My thoughts on my own identity and especially that of the patchwork of
Asian Americans is played out much more thoroughly in my forthcoming book, Bill
Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America (1992).

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

groups with members of varied Asian backgrounds that are labeled or
regarded as "Asian American" this or that. I do regard myself as Chinese
American when specific cultural signals are invoked, such as when I am
with relatives (most of whom are Chinese American), when I am in
Chinatown, or when I am in a Chinese restaurant. However, I don't recall
ever being able to regard myself simply as an American. My racial features
inevitably evoke certain reactions, looks, body language, and treatment
from the people with whom I interact, so that I am constantly reminded that
I am Asian American or Chinese American rather than simply "American."

But my personal example cannot serve as a standard. As an American-
born Asian American (who grew up in Arizona, no less), today I am in the
clear minority of Asian Americans, most of whom are foreign born and not
of Chinese ancestry. Informal surveys which I and my colleagues have con-
ducted on how Asian Americans self-identify reveal a range of responses.
Many Asian Americans, even some born in the United States, do not regard
themselves as Asian Americans, but rather as Chinese Americans, Japanese
Americans, or Vietnamese Americans. Others insist that because they act
American and think of themselves as American they are treated as such by
others. Still others respond that their identity depends on the time of day.
In a work environment with no other Asian Americans, some regard them-
selves as simply Americans, others are reminded that they are Asian
American, while all might regard themselves as Filipino or Chinese
American if, for example, they volunteer after work at a community center.

My conversations with Pat, her writings, and the example she sets
remind me that at times one form of my identity-one which I can take
pride in-is simply that of a person of color.' This realization takes into
account my need to engage in identity switching from situation to situa-
tion depending on environmental stimuli, that my identity as an Asian
American is not an identity for all times and all purposes. I often person-
ally respond to situations simply as a person of color because of how I am
treated and in large part because of analagous experiences that I have
had with other non-Asian American people of color. When Pat writes about
slavery and refers to her great-great-grandmother Sophie and her great-
grandmother Mary, I think of my mother Helen Annie being held by

I It's interesting that back in the Golden Years we didn't talk that much about
being people of color. While it consumes much of the conversation in our private
circles today, back then, while you were probably already writing on the topic, it
was simply a time of experience for me. Recently, I've listened and learned a great
deal from new friends-friends like Regina Austin and Alex Johnson-whose
views have been valuable to my growth.

1992]



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

immigration officials on Angel Island."0 When Pat reveals her inability to
penetrate the portals of Benetton in New York because of the color of her
skin, it reminds me of standing in line for popcorn at a movie theater at Lake
Tahoe and being harassed with racial epithets by some of the locals. When
she reveals her compulsion to be formal in establishing an enduring rela-
tionship with her apartment building owner, I'm reminded of my own
naivet6 in agreeing to my first full-time teaching salary on a handshake, only
to learn years later that I'd been burned royally; or reminded of one next-
door neighbor with whom I have chosen to communicate in writing ever
since my other neighbors informed me that this person generally refers to
my family as "those Asians." As academics of color, Pat and I also share
countless other comparable experiences largely because we are of color.

Of course, I would be foolish to make a claim that a totally unified iden-
tity among people of color exists. But these common experiences might
allow such an identity to be properly viewed as a means of achieving
political integration-a process of developing an identity or platform
allowing the group(s) to operate within the political system While main-
taining separate ethnic or racial identities for non-political purposes. In this
sense, it becomes a civic identity which transcends any single situation. Yet
inflexibly advocating a unified identity among people of color is danger-
ous and should give great pause to those people of color (many, I'm sure)
who believe in cultural pluralism. Claiming or advocating a uniform peo-
ple-of-color identity smacks of the same cauldron-like approach of the
Anglo-conformity melting pot models of Americanization that we have
resisted. The formation of a people-of-color political and social identity
must be accompanied by the same type of respect for separate cultural
heritages and democratic development that we have so long sought from

10 Many of my mother's experiences have influenced me. Her detention on
Angel Island (particularly outrageous since she was actually born in Scranton,
Pennsylvania, but I guess in the 1920s it was hard for immigration inspectors to
think that any Chinese person could be born in the United States), her single-
handed running of a small grocery store, her extension of credit to striking copper
miners which led to her near bankruptcy, her fluency in Spanish, have all helped
to shape my views.

My father had great qualities as well. While he toiled at getting my mother
released from Angel Island (Chinese referred to it only as the "Island" because it
was no place for angels), he slipped the following poem to her:

Each moment with you is like the first day of Spring,
Each moment without you evokes the agony of the coldest
Winter.
So I am diligent in my work,
Inspired by visions of an eternal Springtime with you.

[Vol. 2:1



Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

the mainstream. Just as most people of color have come to realize that
developing and identifying an alternative, pluralistic structure independent
from the mainstream may be a natural (and possibly necessary) response
to the barriers that exclude us from the mainstream structures and insti-
tutions, the retention of ethnic or racial culture, heritage, and values is also
natural and possibly necessary. As varied interests must be respected
and understood, so must we find the time to caucus independent of the
larger coalition.

Pat's writings and manner have proven inspirational to a multitude of
students for whom we care a great deal. And if you are willing to accept
me as an example, you can see that she has inspired and moved her col-
leagues as well. By keeping me conscious of myself-my surroundings, my
identity, my thoughts, my values, my color-Pat has helped me form a foun-
dation from which I can speak much more openly, honestly, and freely."

11 I'm told by the editors of the Journal that my draft is due on February 14-
Valentine's Day. What a perfect opportunity for me to express my thanks for
your inspiration, and to let you know that you will always have a place in my heart.
Love, Bill.

1992]