Williams final

Patricia Williams

“The Pain of Word Bondage” (excerpt from The Alchemy of Race and Rights); reading
study guide questions

1. What do Williams and her friend Peter have in common? What don’t they have in
common? (146-147)

They’ re both about to live in someone’s else. Different: Peter is a white male lawyer who prefers informality of payment so people look past his privilege. Williams is a black female who prefers to show her commitment via detailed contracts to overcome assumptions and stereotypes about her.

2. What do you think that Williams means by the phrase “tonalities of law?” (147)

As Peter and I discussed our experiences, I was struck by the similarity of what each of us was seeking, yet with such polar approaches. We both wanted to establish enduring relationships with the people in whose houses we would be living we both wanted to enhance trust of ourselves and to allow whatever closeness was possible. The similarity of desire, however, could not reconcile our very different relations to the tonalities of law.

3. How is Williams seen by others? How does she want to be seen? (147)

I was raise to be acutely conscious of the likelihood that no matter what degree of professional I am, people will greet and dismiss my black femaleness as unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, powerless, irrational, and probably destitute. Futility and despair are very real parts of my response. So it helps me to clarify boundary; to show that I can speak the language of lease is my way of enhancing trust of me in my business affairs.

4. What is the difference between needs and rights according to Williams? (149)

At this level, the insistence of certain scholars that the "needs" of the oppressed should be emphasized rather than the "rights" amounts to no more than a word game. The choice has merely been made to put needs in the mouth of a rights discourse -- thus transforming need into a new form of right. "Need" then joins "rights" in the pantheon of reified representations of what it is that you, I, and we want from ourselves in society.

5. What is the point of the story that Williams tells about herself, her sister, and the
color of the road? (149-150)

The lesson I learned from listening to her wild perceptions is that it really is possible to see things -- even the most concrete things -- simultaneously yet differently; and that seeing simultaneously yet differently is more easily done by two people than one, but that one person can get the hang of it with time and effort.

6. What is the CLS disutility of rights argument? (151)

One of the most troubling positions advanced by some in CLS is that of rights disutility in political advancement. The CLS disutility argument is premised on the assumption that rights rigid systematizing may keep one at a permanent distance from situations that could profit from closeness and informality. "it is not just that rights talk does not do much good. In the contemporary United States it is positively harmful." Furthermore, any marginal utility to be derived from rights discourse is perceived as being had at the expense of larger issues, rights being pitted against, rather than asserted on behalf of, agendas of social reform. This line of reasoning underlies much of the rationale for CLS abandonment of rights discourse and for its preference for informality -- for restyling, for example, arguments about rights to shelter for the homeless into arguments about the needs of the homeless.

7. Why has describing needs been a “dismal failure” for African-Americans? (151-
152)

For blacks, describing needs has been a dismal failure as political activity. It has succeeded only as a literary achievement. The history of our need is certainly moving enough to have been called poetry, oratory, epic entertainment -- but it has never been treated by white institutions as the statement of political priority. Some of our greatest politicians have been forced to become ministers or blues singers. Even white descriptions of the blues tend to remove the daily hunger and hurt from need and abstract it into a mood. And whoever would legislate against depression? Particularly something as rich, soulful, and sonorously productive as black depression.

8. What do rights give those who have been historically disenfranchised? (153-154)

For the historically disempowered, the conferring of rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of their humanity: rights imply a respect that places one in the referential range of self and others, that elevates one's status from human body to social being. For blacks, then, the attainment of rights signifies the respectful behavior, the collective responsibility, properly owed by a society to one of its own.

9. Who is Austin Miller and how, perversely, did he become the fuel for Williams’
survival? (155)

Now the Millers were the slaveholders of my maternal grandmother's clan. The Millers were also my great great grandparents and great aunts and who knows what else. My great great grandfather Austin Miller, a thirty five year old lawyer, impregnated my eleven year old great great grandmother Sophie, making her the mother of Mary, my great grandmother, by the time she was twelve. In ironic, perverse obeisance to the rationalizations of this bitter ancestral mix, the image of this self centered child molester became the fuel for my survival in the dispossessed limbo of my years at Harvard, the Bakke years, when everyone was running around telling black people that they were very happy to have us there but after all they did have to lower the standards and readjust the grading system. And it worked. I got through law school, quietly driven by the false idol of white man within me, and absorbed much of the knowledge and values that had enslaved my foremothers.

10. Why won’t the informal systems of CLS lead to better outcomes? (158-159)

This failure of rights discourse, much noted in CLS scholarship, does not logically mean that informal systems will lead to better outcomes. Some structures are the products of social forces and people who wanted them that way. If one assumes, as blacks must, not the larger world wants to overcome alienation but that many heartily embrace it, driven not just by fear but by hatred and taboo, then informal systems as well as formal systems will be run principally by unconscious or irrational forces: "Human nature has an invincible dread of becoming more conscious of itself." This underscores my sense of the importance of rights: rights are to law what conscious commitments are to the psyche. This country's worst historical moments have not been attributable to rights assertion but to a failure of rights commitment.

11. “Rights are to law what conscious commitments are to the psyche.” Explain (159)

Rather than a normative exclamation of what must be done, rights and psyche commitments tangibly indicate that this normative exclamation will be pursued through action.

12. Why did Europeans refuse to recognize the legal status or rights of indigenous
tribal peoples? (159)

Such a social construction applied to rights mythology suggests the way in which rights assertion has been limited by delimiting certain others as "extrinsic" to rights entitlement: "Europe during the discovery era refused to recognize legal status or rights for indigenous tribal peoples because 'heathens' and 'infidels' were legally presumed to lack the rational capacity necessary to assume an equal status or exercise equal rights under the European's medievally-derived legal world-view.