Reflections on The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Journal of College Admission, Spring 2001 by Wiliams, Patricia

Deans Essay

What book have you read in the last year or two that has changed your understanding of the world, other people, or yourself?

I have been grappling with the luxuries of whiteness. It's not that I haven't thought about issues of race and privilege and power before; I have. Lots. But recently it became more personal, more intimate. Being a white heterosexual woman has afforded me the opportunity to be in control of my sexuality, and of representations of it. Previously, when people passed me on the street kissing a boyfriend, they'd smile. Now it's not so simple.

Being white means that I have a choice about when I want to think about race matters. I've chosen to think a fair amount about them, but only when I want to.

Dating an African American man changed that. It exposed me to the enmity of African American women to salacious comments from men on the street, to the obsequious pandering of liberal white people who go out of their way not to appear racist, and to rethinking some of my own assumptions. It's hard to give up the luxury of thinking about race only when I choose to.

In fact, though, it's impossible not to struggle with these issues after reading Patricia Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights. A law professor, Williams is brutally, personally, and touchingly incisive. "The original vehicle for my interest in the intersection of commerce and the Constitution was my family history," she writes. "A few years ago, I came into the possession of what may have been the contract of sale for my great-- great-grandmother."

Patricia Williams tells stories. Stories change lives. Her account of being locked out of a Benetton store in Soho on a Saturday afternoon by a white teenaged bubble gum-chewing clerk is breathtaking in the power of its language and also in the fact that her story surprises few African Americans, while white folks respond by exclaiming, "Oh my, that's unbelievable." "He snuffed my sense of humanitarian catholicity, and there was nothing I could do to snuff his, without making a spectacle of myself."

But she did make a spectacle of herself. The story, her telling of this story in this book and in this way, became an important moment in legal studies, in the movement called Critical Race Theory. The book shook me, moved me, often, to tears. I was angered by those who did not respond to it as I did, those in and out of the academy who dismissed Williams as just another angry black woman-those who couldn't hear her.

Telling the truth, it seems, just isn't good enough. And recognizing the luxurious nature of things we take for granted is only a beginning.

Editor's note: The author of this essay was invited personally to write for this column by Brian Hopewell, the innovator of the column and author the first Dean's Essay. The column has since been opened to all college admission professionals in order to yield a more diverse and representative sampling of the types of questions institutions are asking prospective students. This essay, which fits perfectly with this issue's multicultural theme, will appear in the author's forthcoming book from St. Martin's Press. The author retains the copyright.

Rachel Toor is a writer living in Durham, NC.

She served as an acquisition editor at Oxford and Duke University Presses for twelve years and worked three years in admission at Duke University (NC).

Toor has authored a book on the culture of elite college admission, which will be published in fall 2001 by St. Martin's Press.