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

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Brief Article

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...