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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Law professor and commentator Patricia Williams talks about passing, choosing her adopted son from a racial menu, and the myth of Condoleezza Rice.
Dec 15, 2004 | Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University, isn't afraid to take on controversial subjects -- even if they lead to death threats, insults (a student once said that she "epitomized liberal bias") or hysterical labels like this one from London's Daily Mail: "She's a militant black feminist who hates all white people." One of America's foremost commentators on race, rights and gender, she writes a regular column for the Nation ("Diary of a Mad Law Professor"), and is the author of three books about race. To Williams, the personal is always political, and vice versa; most of her writing is rooted in personal experience. However, Williams' latest book, "Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own," is her most inner-directed and autobiographical yet.
"Open House" is organized into metaphorical "rooms" in which Williams moves gracefully from personal anecdotes to discussions of social issues. In "The Outhouse," she uses the story of her great-aunt Mary to discuss racial "passing." The daughter of a light-skinned black mother and the descendant of a wealthy white landowner, Mary spent her childhood as a servant to distant white relatives in St. Louis, then moved home to her family's house in Tennessee. As an adolescent, she desperately wanted to be educated. Inspired by an advertisement on the toilet sheets in her family's outhouse, Mary hatched a plan to pass as a Native American in order to receive a scholarship to an elite Boston finishing school.
In "The Music Room," Williams talks about her decision to take piano lessons at age 50 as an antidote to a midlife crisis (she finds it "a wonderful form of meditation"), and ends with a conversation she had with some of her friends about the discrimination they face as outspoken black women. And in "The Crystal Stair," Williams weaves together the history of the black middle class, the irony of African-American cliques and secret societies, and her pet issue, affirmative action.
Salon met with Williams in her office at Columbia, where she looked nothing like the way she describes herself in the chapter titled "The Boudoir." ("I dress down instead of up, and my hair is a complete disaster.") Draped in an elegant black shawl, her bob held back by clips, Williams, 53, talked about public intellectualism, Bill Cosby and her uncomfortable relationship with the "myth" of Condoleezza Rice.
You received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. What's it like being considered a "genius"?
It makes me laugh every time somebody says I'm a genius. In fact, after I got it, some friends of mine made me a little ankle bracelet with the word "Genius" on it, but the letters never stayed in the right place. So people would look at it and say, "Eniusg?"
The MacArthur lends you legitimacy and credibility. People think you're much smarter than you are. It has been instructive because I think you ratchet yourself up because of it.
