Alchemy of Race and Rights - Hardcover

Williams, Patricia J.

  • 4.32 out of 5 stars
    787 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780674014701: Alchemy of Race and Rights
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0674014707 ISBN 13: 9780674014701
Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Patricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is an eloquent autobiographical essay in which the author reflects on the intersection of race, gender, and class. Using the tools of critical literary and legal theory, she sets out her views of contemporary popular culture and current events, from Howard Beach to homelessness, from Tawana Brawley to the law-school classrom, from civil rights to Oprah Winfrey, from Bernhard Goetz to Marth Beth Whitehead. She also traces the workings of "ordinary racism"--everyday occurences, casual, unintended, banal perhaps, but mortifying. Taking up the metaphor of alchemy, Williams casts the law as a mythological text in which the powers of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, sanity and insanity, wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries of discourse. In deliberately transgressing such boundaries, she persues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately, transformative.

Williams gets to the roots of racism not by fingerpointing but by much gentler methods. Her book is full of anecdote and witness, vivid characters known and observed, trenchant analysis of the law's shortcomings. Only by such an inquiry and such patient phenomenology can we understand racism. The book is deeply moving and not so, finally, just because racism is wrong--we all know that. What we don't know is how to unthink the process that allows racism to persist. THis Williams enables us to see. The result is a testament of considerable beauty, a triumph of moral tactfullness, The result, as the title suggests, is magic.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Patricia J. Williams is Professor of Law, Columbia University.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Harvard University Press
Publication date
1991
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0674014707
ISBN 13 
9780674014701
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
272
Rating
  • 4.32 out of 5 stars
    787 ratings by Goodreads

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780674014718: Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  0674014715 ISBN 13:  9780674014718
Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1992
Softcover