Customer Reviews

Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Finally, after a year and a half in law school I have found something that feels real. Professor Williams' book addresses all the unspoken assumptions and rules that frame and defines the study of law. Her voice is the first that I have heard or read which captures the frustration of existing in a world of law that is so unapologetically deficient of humanity. The book reveals the rich and thick veneer of denial that surrounds and protects those privileged by the law. She dissects the silent and invisible plague of racism that infiltrates every aspect of the law. She forces discomfort on herself and the reader in order to reach some greater knowledge or understanding.

It is the book's refusal to conform to traditional forms of legal discourse that helps to powerfully illuminate the inherent limitations, oppressions, and inadequacies of the law. The narrative form brings to life the messy complications and nuances that inhabit not just law, but our relationship as individuals, and as a nation, to race and gender.

Perhaps it is the vulnerability laid so bare, or the familiar voice of madness creeping so closely, whatever the source, the voice in the book was one of the most powerful I have heard in years. It is so refreshingly honest and brave, a book I am very grateful to have encountered.

I recently had the pleasure of re-reading this remarkable book. Over the past half-century, it is no doubt one of the most important books on race published in the United States. The author blends autobiography, keen visual observations, analysis, and heart into a powerful journey through the landscape of American race relations. The result is utterly convincing: the convergence of the "personal and the political" moves each reader to examine his or her own relationship to the subjects at hand. While most race books pontificate, this one eases the reader into examining some very difficult, indeed painful questions. Williams, a writer of great skill and elegance, has pulled off a miricale in the field of race writing, an enduring masterpiece that has changed the way we think and talk about race in America.

This is an extraordinary book. Through the use of a wide array of reasoning and writing methods, Williams makes it possible for us to get a glimpse of the dangerous and contradictory legal world that ethnic minorities must negotiate to survive. It may be a bit of a stretch for people unaccustomed to thinking outside the box as well as those unfamilar with literature and literary theory. But the insight Williams offers is well worth the effort. It also provides members of the privileged class with the unusual & valuable experience of not being the central focus of the text. A fabulous experience for readers with an open mind!

The Alchemy of Race and Rights is a wonderful exploration of race and the law in modern society. In a whirlwind of impressionistic strokes, Williams beautifully illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of bodies and rules. Her elegant prose leads the reader to contemplate the law from a place where subject position is everything, and the false security of formal equivalence and abstract monetization are the very currency of oppression.

Though her writing style may be off-putting to those in search of a formal treatise on race and the law, and her fragmented invocation of the personal as a starting point for inductive work is sometimes difficult to follow, the impressionistic quality of the text is also one of its great strengths. In the end, a deeper meaning is conveyed through this sometimes schizophrenic free association than could be done through any more formally-structured argument.

Keep an open mind, and read everything twice. You won't regret the effort.

There is a lot to complain about regarding race and civil rights and this author questions how far we've come.

We have NOT arrived, she reminds us.

She is a downer and does not leave much hope, yet, somehow it is energizing to read.

I have read her 'Diary of a Mad Law Prof.' in The Nation with considerable interest. I really don't think she is one of the brightest bulbs in contemporary Black discourse, and I gladly turn to bell hooks and even Cornell West when I want some heady discussion of racism and the white attitudes that persist in this society. Williams seems to me one of those well meaning people who unfortunately have produced a somewhat simple-minded book, and yet it could serve as a useful corrective to similarly simple-minded books from the conservative side of things, especially Shelby Steele and co. Overall, this book has little to teach anyone actively involved in changing attitudes, but it is a fair attempt nonetheless.

I can't even speak about Williams' ideas because her overly-affected, wouldbe-poet style obscures any real thought. No wonder this book cost me only $.50. Awful. Just awful writing.

This book is hardly about race, but is rather a tome of self-indulgent ramblings.

A great deal of discourse has come out of the use of this book in my law class on the interaction of law in society, but I find it's use counter-productive to the forward-thinking goals of most academic institutions. Prof. Williams cannot seem to make up her mind on anything. She attacks Marxist lawyers, while at the same time advocating an affront to the bourgeoise, especially those without black skin (whites, Hispanics and Asians are all vilified to some degree in this book). While masquerading as a socialist activist herself, she then advocates a very right-wing goal of keeping each other in our respective racial boxes to keep order, even refusing to accept that she herself can be at once black, female and educated -- these three identities always appear separately for her. Her book is a regressive look at the future that denies the possibility of progress in race and gender relations. She is sadly unable to employ the power in her rights and instead prefers to wallow in a viscious cycle that refuses to recognize nuance, and prefers rather to assume racial categories, because they are simpler. Very few new ideas are presented in this racist, ethnically intolerant and misandric text and it is hardly worth a read, beyond the fact that it may come up in discussion.

Patricia Williams uses convoluted analogies to illustrate her assertions that greatly detract from her book. She openly admits that she is a legal collectivist in the traditional sense with a strong belief in maintaining group rights, group priveleges, group responsibilities, etc. Famous legal collectivists in the past have included VI Lenin, Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, General Mengitsu, General Pinochet, Idi Amin, and Mao. They also were fervent believers in group rights, group guilt, and group punishment. The Nuremberg Race Laws (1936) in Germany are a fine example of legal collectivism taken to its logical extreme.

Williams style is more of a problem than her substance. She uses numerous anecdotal stories, told from one side, some of which are dubious in truth, and rare questionably-derived statistics, to demonstrate an invisible undercurrent of racism from whites against blacks, and these are the issues she addresses best. Her style could perhaps best be described as varying between insightful and incoherent, with I'm afraid more of the latter.
Williams argues in the beginning of her book against generalization, that "reconceptualizing from "objective truth" to rhetorical event will be a more nuanced sense of legal and social responsibility," (p.11) then proceeds to generalize and polarize whites and blacks and generalize about numerous other issues throughout the book:
"White women are prostitutes; black women are whores" p. 175
"To say that blacks never fully believed in rights is true" p. 163
"Blacks are thus, in full culturally imagistic terms, not merely unmothered but badly fathered, abused and disowned by whites." p. 163
Argues would probably be a bad choice of word, for logic is the study of arguments, and Williams is neither consistent nor logical. In style, Williams is neither clear nor concise, and in one word, rambles.