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In The Alchemy of Race and
Rights, Patricia Williams is trying to write her experience in a way that
can be understood. The unconventional style of The Alchemy of Race and
Rights represents how difficult she finds this task. She desires to create
a text which "encompasses the straightforwardness of real life and reveals
complexity of meaning" (6). However,
the space of Williams' writing is one in which I participate as other.
Williams' text is full of stories,
richly told and compelling, of people who say and do things which place her
in uncomfortable, conflicted positions. It is these people, and the society
they reflect which has created the need for Williams to struggle with representation.
According to Barbara Johnson, this complexity is reflected in the choice of
polar bears as icons in the text: "Those bears, so white, so innocent, so caged,
so violent, cannot be read in any simple way" ("The Alchemy of Style
and Law," 169).
My reaction to this personification
of paradox is the desire to be the people that Williams represents,
to be them in order to redefine the voices of racism which she exposes. I
feel the need to resolve, within myself, these paradoxes, but the fact is
that this simplification is not possible. I am a person who lives in a country
where racism is a part of the fabric of social intercourse. Williams lives
here too, but her vision skewers the ugly behaviors that highlight the tearing
and disfiguring of that fabric. I, on the other hand, am only riding the bus
and walking on the sidewalks, unmolested. I wonder at my ability to care about
a hibiscus flower in the face of all of this. Is this evidence of my inability
to see racism as "intimately and organically linked" (Frankenberg
6) to
my own life?
I think I need to learn how to
be all of the people in Williams' text if I want to learn to dis-able racism.
In order to do this, I will have to both admit my complicity in these behaviors
and establish my difference.
The stories that Williams tells
always seem to have a deep resonance for me, no matter how often I read them.
They mean something: both the homeless woman in the lobby of her building
and the man on the train who stops to talk to homeless people but won't give
them money, in some effort to regain his humanity without opening his wallet.
The stories I tell don't really
mean anything. They don't have the rhetorical power to highlight, as Williams
does, the terrible paradoxes which are involved in living in a complicated,
racially and economically divided society. I avoid stories with unhappy endings.
But I am, after all, living in
some kind of "real world." So perhaps my stories do have some meaning
after all. Perhaps the gesture of stopping to talk, to establish empathy,
might allow us ultimately to share other spaces.
Wallets?
Lobbies?
Harvard Professorships?
When reading Williams' stories
I see myself, my fears, my hostility in the people she represents. But I never
feel as if she is seeing me. I find myself thinking, "Yes, I am there,
but there is more to me than that."
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