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."