NCJ Number
131885
Date Published
1991
Length
263 pages
Annotation
This personal journal of the author, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer, consists of her reflections on the intersection of race, gender, and class.
Abstract
Using the tools of critical literary and legal theory, she reflects upon her personal experiences and observations. She presents her views of contemporary popular culture and current events, including the Howard Beach racial incidents, homelessness, the Tawana Brawley saga, the law-school classroom, civil rights, Oprah Winfrey, Bernhard Goetz, and Mary Beth Whitehead. She also traces the workings of "ordinary racism" that involves daily occurrences which wound their victims but seem casual, unintended, and banal to uninvolved observers. Using the metaphor of alchemy (the changing of a substance into a substance more valuable), the law is portrayed as a mythological text in which the powers of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, and sanity and insanity wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries of discourse. In transgressing such boundaries, the author follows a path toward racial justice that is transformative. She argues that all discrimination is at its roots a failure of the will of a person to view another as one who has thoughts, feelings, and rights as important as one's own. Chapter notes