Vampires anonymous and critical race practice.

• Author: Williams, Robert A., Jr.
• Position: Symposium: Representing Race

I.

I can only explain what Vampires Anonymous has done for me by telling my story. I know, stories, particularly autobiographical stories, are currently being dissed by some law professors. Raised in an overly obsessive, objectively neutralized cultural style, they are plain and simple Storyhaters. Their middle to upper class parents had money, a home in the burbs, and nice kids who were going to go on from their fancy grade schools and college preparatory gigs to Harvard/Stanford/Yale -- all those types of pricey places where law professors usually come from. These kids were raised to be objective, neutral, neutered, fair, etc., right from the get-go. That's why they're Storyhaters, and that's why they became law professors. It's basically all they could ever hope to be.

A common problem with so many of these kids who grow up to be law professors is that all they ever get to know about stories is what they heard from the Bible, or what their parents read to them for bedtime. You know, the type of stuff you find in Cat in the Hat books; like "red fish, blue fish," "Sam I am," things like that.

No wonder these kids hate stories when they grow up to be law professors. After the bogus and silly stuff their parents fed them years ago, a diet of 400 footnotes in law review articles about things like the mailbox rule must seem deliciously stimulating. For them, it's like capturing the taste of a higher, objective truth and reality.

As for autobiography, they wouldn't know what it was if somebody told it to their faces. They are law professors, after all, so they don't listen to other people's stories. Other people's lives aren't nearly as interesting as their own. They don't practice autobiography as a writing style for themselves, because when you're raised like they are with everything and all that, you become so self-centered that you think it's immodest to write in the first person. It's not objective, neutral, neutered. And besides, how can you possibly be fair when you are talking about yourself, a law professor, so great, and all that? Much better to do really cool things in your life, like write a treatise on the mailbox rule in contracts, die, and then have other law professors write about how smart and great you were. That's what Heaven's all about for law professors anyway: getting other smart people to do things for you, posthumously. It's like having a real good free research assistant when you're dead.

You can probably tell that I don't get along too well with these Law Professor Storyhaters. The real problem I have with them is that they've rarely met a real storyteller in their lives. Like I said, they've either been read to or preached to from the Bible, or their parents have read to them from books. For their entire lives, it's either God or this unresolved Oedipal/Electra figure interposed between them and the texts that they confront. That's really why they hate stories. They've never been able to deal with a narrative they can't control.

Indian people love their storytellers. We are taught at an early age to love, respect, and surrender ourselves to them. Have you ever seen the storyteller dolls made by the Pueblo Indian potters? Grandmother has six or eight kids hanging on her from everywhere, and notice, she doesn't have a book in her arm. That's how Indians hear their stories, and that's where the love of stories comes from: from the love of a good storyteller. Straight from the mouth, unmediated by impenetrable page and opaque ink, straight from the heart. That's why every time I tell a story now, it's an act of love in honor of the memory and wisdom of my elders who first told me my favorite stories.

II.

As a child I loved all the stories told to me by my Lumbee grandmother, mother, aunts and uncles, and all my many cousins to the nth degree of consanguinity. I have known some great storytellers in my life.

My favorite stories are Pembroke stories (as my family called them), stories about where all my Lumbee relatives are from- Pembroke, North Carolina. There was the time the house on my grandmother's farm burned down, and the family's daring escape with her two baby children under her arms. My mother would tell me stories about growing up on the family farm, stories about things that were foreign and exotic to me, like the smell of a tobacco barn or mules that would not be moved. She'd hold out her hands, showing me the calluses and scars and how the blood would run down her fingers after picking in the fields all day.

I've heard really horrible stories my family tells about being a Lumbee Indian in North Carolina, the tripartite system of racial apartheid we lived under for so many years as disenfranchised "persons of color"; the three separate school systems -- one for whites, one for Lumbees, and one for "Negroes" -- and things like that. That was nothing compared to the stories of racial terrorism I often heard told by my relatives. My grandmother once had to hide under her bed with her children one night when the "KluKluxers" rode their torches and big white horses outside around the house. My Uncle Boyd, my mother's oldest brother, unarmed, was shot to death by a Klansman. Every one of my aunts and uncles has a story about that tragic event in our family history. So too, the time in the late 1950s when the Lumbees made national news by riding the Klan out of Pembroke. I love every single one of those stories, and those who told them to me.

III.

Here's my story about how I joined Vampires Anonymous.

I was raised in a traditional Indian home, which meant I was raised to think independently and to act for others. Too many of the Law Professor Storyhater types I've met seem to have been raised just the opposite, that is, to think for others and act independently. But that's another story. For me, my upbringing meant that I had to endure probing questions at the family dinner table, asked by my elders, like, "Boy, what have you done for your people today?"

Now, when you are asked that type of question by one of your Lumbee elders, there's a background context you are presumed to understand. Because acting for others is regarded as an individual responsibility in Lumbee culture, each individual is responsible for making sure that he or she acquires the necessary skills and abilities for assuming that responsibility. So, when you, as a young boy, are asked the question, "What have you done for your people, today?" what you are really being asked is, "Have you studied hard today?," "Have you learned something of use that will help your family, that will help other Lumbee people?" "We know you are just a youngster, but do you understand that you are expected to serve others through your hard work and achievements?"

For me, then, going into law teaching was a way of translating such childhood Lumbee lessons into practice. My 'inner child" saw being a law professor who taught and researched in the field of Indian law as a nice, efficient way of being a good person in the eyes of my family, my Indian community, and others. And the pay, considering the hours and flexibility, was damn good.

I was quickly abused and damaged, however, soon upon becoming a law professor. What I didn't know upon entering law teaching was that the law professors who ran the law school where I got my first job didn't give a damn about me saving Indians through Indian law. They cared about one thing and one thing only: themselves. You see, as I soon came to learn, I had been hired to make them and their law school look good.

I admit, I was slow on the uptake. After all, I was the beneficiary of affirmative action at their institution, and to their mind, that meant I really didn't belong there. As a senior faculty member told me soon after arriving at the law school, he had argued that I should be hired, despite the fact that my previous publication record was so "weak." Thank you Masked Man.

Anyway, it soon became apparent that I was hired because they needed at least one minority on the faculty besides their foreignborn African law specialist. He "didn't count," in the words of a manifesto proclaimed the year before I arrived at the law school by its small but vocal Minority Law Students Association. The faculty thought that by hiring me, a marginally qualified American Indian with a Harvard Law School degree, they would look good. They'd have looked better, as one of them told me, if I had been Black or Hispanic, or if I had "looked more Indian," but this was the early 1980s, and a lot of law professors had come to accept the idea that every law school had to have at least one affirmative action baby, and I was the best they could deliver at the time.

To really make them look good, however, they told me I had to get tenure. The way for me to do that, as I soon came to learn, was to publish three 100-page law review articles with 400 footnotes.

What a breeze.

These three articles, to be completed during the most productive, most vital years of my legal academic career, couldn't appear in just any old law review to count toward tenure. They had to be published in a select group of "Top Ten" law reviews.

Convincing my senior colleagues even further that I didn't belong at their law school, I asked several of them embarrassing questions like, "Could you please list for me the Top Ten law reviews?" As if anyone needed to actually ask to see the list. You found it in your head, stupid. It was like natural law -- a universal, objective form of truth and knowledge that non-affirmatively actioned law professors unlike myself were just born with.

Persisting in exposing my deprived cultural background, and preparing for possible future litigation, I asked to see a copy of the list they kept in their heads anyway. On these, one found universal agreement on the Top Six or So law reviews in the Top Ten: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Michigan. But when you got past that point, the list got kind of...