Returns.

• Author: Dent, Gina
• Position: Patricia Williams' contributions in legal education - Fourth Annual Symposium: The Work of Patricia Williams

Patricia Williams was my teacher. In the five stages of preparing for this day, I heard many of the phrases from The Alchemy of Race and Rights echo through my mind. (1) I felt just like that monkey Williams describes staring at the keyboard, as she puts it, "all those letters of the alphabet, full of random signification." (2) And, of course, there was no shortage of news items vying for my attention on radio and TV. George Zimmerman's brother, Robert, was interviewed by Michel Martin on NPR's Tell Me More, explaining why growing up with his Afro-Peruvian mother in Virginia meant that race could not be a factor in his brother's shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida one year ago, their growing-up marked, as it was, by a difference of culture (of foods and how they spoke at home, he mentioned), while also ensuring, he suggested, his family's color-blindness? The President of Emory University wrote confidently about the Three-Fifths Compromise as an historical example that might be useful in fending off the contemporary threat of sequester, avoiding the fiscal cliff, and getting the President and Congress (the only relevant social actors) to work together. (4) In his response to criticism about his letter, he went on to apologize for the "hurt caused by not communicating more clearly [his] own beliefs." (5) And the State of Mississippi's attempt to get rid of the sole abortion clinic remaining in the state through House Bill 1390, ostensibly making Mississippi an "abortion-free" state, as Governor Phil Bryant called it, (6) could only recall Williams' prescient words: "[T]he right to privacy might be a function of wealth." (7)

Rejecting this low-hanging fruit, I tried to avoid the mistake of so many of my students, who embrace with great enthusiasm the form of Patricia Williams' brilliance, but ignore some of what I always took to be the most important invitations in her work. I reminded myself first of one of them--Williams' preference for induction as a critical method, which I found to be such a relief while in graduate school and decided to start from where I was. For the past several weeks, I have been conducting an experiment with my graduate students. I am teaching a course in black feminisms (oh, yes, that's the experiment). I was surprised and grateful that any of them signed up for this adventure, given that the subject is treated as anachronistic in the world where I spend much of my time. I myself have become accustomed to living at a kind of temporal disjuncture in my United States-based academic life. My students are simply not exposed to this material because it is assumed by others, on their behalf, that what they would learn there they should already know, have moved through and beyond. They are confounded not by the newness of the materials they are confronting, but by the ways that the recursivity of these works redraws their larger relationship to knowledge. They begin, as it were, to see "her shape and his hand." (8)

One of their assignments was to read The Alchemy of Race and Rights. More than twenty years since its publication, I found that the students were immediately undone. And, suddenly, they were filled with stories. Inspired by the deterritorialization in Williams' writing--its breaking up of the conventions of owned objects and mapped terrain they ceased their flag-wielding activities...