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

• Author: Bruhl, Elise M.

When I became a law student, I found that people expected me to be versed in every aspect of the law. Just as complete strangers would ask my brother to provide on-the-spot diagnoses of their physical complaints once they discovered he was a medical student, people now ask me to solve landlord-tenant disputes or comment on the effect of recent legislative enactments; my knowledge often falls far short of the status accorded to me. Another question that people ask is whether I could speak with someone they know -- daughter, cousin, friend, co-worker -- who is applying to law school. At these moments, I do find that I can describe what it is like to be a law student, and often do so in all-too-vivid detail. If my descriptions do not deter them from applying, I then move on to recommended reading.

Most of these prospective law students may have seen The Paper Chase(1) or have heard of One L,(2) but I find myself recommending that they read Patricia Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights.(3) While I have wondered whether Professor Williams would like being placed alongside Professor Kingsfield in the mind of a law school applicant, I have made the recommendation nonetheless, for in this work Williams discusses how the law, which is imbued with such profound aspirational goals, so often fails those most in need of its protection.(4) In addition, Williams also describes some of the processes and pressures that can make the experience of being a law student so disorienting.(5)

Given Williams's acumen in discussing the law and its shortcomings in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, I found myself looking forward to her discussions of racism and national identity in The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice. Her work provides some needed relief from past discussions of racism as well as some compelling arguments about how to approach intractable problems of racial tension and racial misrepresentation. Williams's work covers some all-too-familiar topics, such as the stigmatization of welfare mothers, the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, and talk radio, all subjects that have been discussed and written about to such a degree, and with such patterned argumentation, that her attempt to offer a more sophisticated interpretation of these problems might appear to be overly ambitious, or, to a more cynical mindset, somewhat futile.

While the fact that Williams discusses such well-known topics was initially a cause for concern for this reader, her focus on such famous, or infamous, topics is one of the book's strengths. At her best, Williams is able to reconfigure the context in which these subjects have been interpreted and derive new significance and insights from them. In her opening chapter, "Scarlet, the Sequel," Williams heads right into some highly rancorous debates by investigating the contested political symbol of the welfare mother. She begins by describing two moments in which impoverished women become objects of public spectacle and derision. In Williams's first example, a televangelist rants against welfare as government-sponsored "fornication"; his screams are met with wild applause and a corresponding reaction shot of a white, two parent family (pp. 1-2). Her second example involves a much smaller audience, but is equally affecting; Williams describes a ride on a subway car in which a white man enters the car and reacts to the sight and smell of a black homeless woman by telling a young black man on the same car, "You see that? That's why you'd better learn how to work!" (pp. 3-4). The reactions of the audiences -- wild applause in the first, silence and range in the second -- indicate the range of emotions at work in this debate. They also indicate that the scale of the audience does not matter, for the rhetorical figure of the "welfare mother" has come to embody a variety of suppositions about women's poverty and...