The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice. - book reviews

Progressive, The, Jan, 1997 by Anne-Marie Cusac

Patricia Williams is a law professor at Columbia University. She is also an acute observer of American culture. Her book of essays, The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (Harvard), looks at the 1990s culture of hate: the movements to dismantle welfare and affirmative action, Dan Quayle's "Murphy Brown" announcement of open season on single mothers, the tirades against "quota queen" Lani Guinier, the popularity of Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

Williams argues that 1990s-style hatred follows in a long American tradition of prejudice. This tradition has fed what Williams sees as "a remarkable stasis in race relations, an intractability of gender hierarchy, an entrenched power dynamic that has resisted the reorderings of our very best rhetoricians and theoreticians."

In "Scarlet, the Sequel," Williams writes about watching Thursday afternoon T.V. shows. "The one that riveted me most," she writes, "was a particularly passionate televangelist who screamed and ranted against a government that provides any money at all to women who `fornicate.' "

Williams says the word "fornicate" makes her feel as if she has "entered the realm of The Scarlet Letter." And she brings the analogy home.

"Would Hester Prynne survive in today's sin-obsessed yet multi-orgasmic family circus? Would we find her held up for mockery in the new-age stockades of the Rush Limbaugh show? Would she die in small increments in a homeless shelter, the slow-motion equivalent of a public stoning? Or would she end up like a typical woman on welfare--a young white woman with children who is fully convinced she is not typical but just temporarily down on her luck. And what if poor Hester were black?"

Williams has closely studied the complexities of American hatred, and she uses her knowledge to decode the current language of U.S. social policy. On the subject of affirmative action, for example, she gives a dose of informed good sense, a cooling antidote to the popular rumor that, if minorities and women win, white men will lose:

"In fact, affirmative action and minority set-aside programs are vastly more complicated than this `you're-in, I'm-out' conception suggests. Nothing in this rigid win-loss dichotomy permits the notion that everyone could end up a beneficiary, that expansion rather than substitution might be possible, and that the favoring of multiple cultures is enhancement of the total rather than a sweepingly reflexive act of favoritism for anything other than the monolithic purity of an all-white nation."

Williams is essential reading for those of us who are baffled by the ever-mutating, eerily familiar presence of hatred in the United States. She approaches her subjects with respect and care, and asks the same of us.