Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own

A warm and seductive meditation on the personal and political from a renowned columnist and "one of the great theorists of race and law" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).
With her trademark wit and insight, Patricia Williams relates stories from the many facets of her life--as a lawyer, scholar, writer, African-American, descendant of slaves, mother, and single, fifty-something woman--always aware of the ironies inherent in situations where her many identities don't conform to societal expectations. The Open House of Williams's imagination takes us on a funny, often provocative, and entertaining journey which includes Oprah, Williams's Aunt Mary who passed as white, her Best White Friend, and tips on how to eat a watermelon without fear of racial judgment.

Biographies & Memoirs

Williams, Patricia J.

Arts & Literature

Picador

Open House strings together a delightful array of observations, reminiscences, anecdotes and commentaries by renowned columnist Patricia Williams. Written with her trademark wit and insight, she relates stories about the many facets of her life - as a lawyer, scholar, writer, African-American, descendant of slaves, mother, and single, fifty-something woman - always aware of the ironies inherent in situations when her many identities don't conform to societal expectations. She tells us of her Great Aunt Mary, who crossed the color line one day, while boarding a train; about her Best White Friend, who believes that the only thing standing between the author and an eligible husband is a make-over; about the day she and her family learned how to eat watermelon without fear of racial judgment; and about why she worships Oprah. She also tackles serious subjects, such as cloning and the legacy of slavery and privacy issues in the cyberage, all with her characteristic sparkling humor and originality. Always provocative, never didactic, Open House is an entertaining journey through the rooms of Pat Williams' imagination.

Community & Culture

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where "color doesn't matter"--where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the great divide between "the poles of other people's imagination and the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides," and discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving racism. Williams offers us a new starting point--"a sensible and sustained consideration"--from which we might begin to deal honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices.

Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997 BBC Reith Lectures)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics

For decades, the field of bioethics has shaped the way we think about ethical problems in science, technology, and medicine. But its traditional emphasis on individual interests such as doctor-patient relationships, informed consent, and personal autonomy is minimally helpful in confronting the social and political challenges posed by new human biotechnologies such as assisted reproduction, human genetic modification, and DNA forensics. Beyond Bioethics addresses these provocative issues from an emerging standpoint that is attentive to race, gender, class, disability, privacy, and notions of democracy—a "new biopolitics." This authoritative volume provides an overview for those grappling with the profound dilemmas posed by these developments. It brings together the work of cutting-edge thinkers from diverse fields of study and public engagement, all of them committed to this new perspective grounded in social justice and public interest values.

Arts & Photography

Darnovsky, Marcy

Duster, Troy

Obasogie, Osagie K.

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

University of California Press

Patricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is an eloquent autobiographical essay in which the author reflects on the intersection of race, gender, and class. Using the tools of critical literary and legal theory, she sets out her views of contemporary popular culture and current events, from Howard Beach to homelessness, from Tawana Brawley to the law-school classrom, from civil rights to Oprah Winfrey, from Bernhard Goetz to Marth Beth Whitehead. She also traces the workings of "ordinary racism"--everyday occurences, casual, unintended, banal perhaps, but mortifying. Taking up the metaphor of alchemy, Williams casts the law as a mythological text in which the powers of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, sanity and insanity, wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries of discourse. In deliberately transgressing such boundaries, she persues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately, transformative. 
 Williams gets to the roots of racism not by fingerpointing but by much gentler methods. Her book is full of anecdote and witness, vivid characters known and observed, trenchant analysis of the law's shortcomings. Only by such an inquiry and such patient phenomenology can we understand racism. The book is deeply moving and not so, finally, just because racism is wrong--we all know that. What we don't know is how to unthink the process that allows racism to persist. THis Williams enables us to see. The result is a testament of considerable beauty, a triumph of moral tactfullness, The result, as the title suggests, is magic.

Alchemy of Race and Rights

Harvard University Press

Patricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is an eloquent autobiographical essay in which the author reflects on the intersection of race, gender, and class. Using the tools of critical literary and legal theory, she sets out her views of contemporary popular culture and current events, from Howard Beach to homelessness, from Tawana Brawley to the law-school classroom, from civil rights to Oprah Winfrey, from Bernhard Goetz to Mary Beth Whitehead. She also traces the workings of “ordinary racism”―everyday occurrences, casual, unintended, banal perhaps, but mortifying. Taking up the metaphor of alchemy, Williams casts the law as a mythological text in which the powers of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, sanity and insanity, wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries of discourse. In deliberately transgressing such boundaries, she pursues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately, transformative.
Williams gets to the roots of racism not by finger-pointing but by much gentler methods. Her book is full of anecdote and witness, vivid characters known and observed, trenchant analysis of the law’s shortcomings. Only by such an inquiry and such patient phenomenology can we understand racism. The book is deeply moving and not so, finally, just because racism is wrong―we all know that. What we don’t know is how to unthink the process that allows racism to persist. This Williams enables us to see. The result is a testament of considerable beauty, a triumph of moral tactfulness. The result, as the title suggests, is magic.

Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor

"Jamaica is the land where the rooster lays an egg...When a Jamaican is born of a black woman and some English or Scotsman, the black mother is literally and figuratively kept out of sight as far as possible, but no one is allowed to forget that white father, however questionable the circumstances of birth...You get the impression that these virile Englishmen do not require women to reproduce. They just come out to Jamaica, scratch out a nest and lay eggs that hatch out into 'pink' Jamaicans." --Zora Neale Hurston 
 We may no longer issue scarlet letters, but from the way we talk, we might as well: W for welfare, S for single, B for black, CC for children having children, WT for white trash. To a culture speaking with barely masked hysteria, in which branding is done with words and those branded are outcasts, this book brings a voice of reason and a warm reminder of the decency and mutual respect that are missing from so much of our public debate. Patricia J. Williams, whose acclaimed book The Alchemy of Race and Rights offered a vision for healing the ailing spirit of the law, here broadens her focus to address the wounds in America's public soul, the sense of community that rhetoric so subtly but surely makes and unmakes. 
 In these pages we encounter figures and images plucked from headlines--from Tonya Harding to Lani Guinier, Rush Limbaugh to Hillary Clinton, Clarence Thomas to Dan Quayle--and see how their portrayal, encoding certain stereotypes, often reveals more about us than about them. What are we really talking about when we talk about welfare mothers, for instance? Why is calling someone a "redneck" okay, and what does that say about our society? When young women appear on Phil Donahue to represent themselves as Jewish American Princesses, what else are they doing? These are among the questions Williams considers as she uncovers the shifting, often covert rules of conversation that determine who "we" are as a nation.

The Rooster's Egg

"Jamaica is the land where the rooster lays an egg...When a Jamaican is born of a black woman and some English or Scotsman, the black mother is literally and figuratively kept out of sight as far as possible, but no one is allowed to forget that white father, however questionable the circumstances of birth...You get the impression that these virile Englishmen do not require women to reproduce. They just come out to Jamaica, scratch out a nest and lay eggs that hatch out into 'pink' Jamaicans." --Zora Neale Hurston
We may no longer issue scarlet letters, but from the way we talk, we might as well: W for welfare, S for single, B for black, CC for children having children, WT for white trash. To a culture speaking with barely masked hysteria, in which branding is done with words and those branded are outcasts, this book brings a voice of reason and a warm reminder of the decency and mutual respect that are missing from so much of our public debate. Patricia J. Williams, whose acclaimed book The Alchemy of Race and Rights offered a vision for healing the ailing spirit of the law, here broadens her focus to address the wounds in America's public soul, the sense of community that rhetoric so subtly but surely makes and unmakes.
In these pages we encounter figures and images plucked from headlines--from Tonya Harding to Lani Guinier, Rush Limbaugh to Hillary Clinton, Clarence Thomas to Dan Quayle--and see how their portrayal, encoding certain stereotypes, often reveals more about us than about them. What are we really talking about when we talk about welfare mothers, for instance? Why is calling someone a "redneck" okay, and what does that say about our society? When young women appear on Phil Donahue to represent themselves as Jewish American Princesses, what else are they doing? These are among the questions Williams considers as she uncovers the shifting, often covert rules of conversation that determine who "we" are as a nation.

The Rooster’s Egg

Blind Goddess brings together the most significant writings of practitioners, professors, and advocates to make sense of what is perhaps the nation’s most astonishing and shameful achievement: the highest per capita incarceration of its citizens anywhere in the world, compounded by the shockingly disproportionate imprisonment of poor people of color. Although there is growing awareness of the huge fiscal cost of mass incarceration, the moral, human, and social devastation of racially skewed law enforcement remains largely unrecognized. The experts and scholars in this collection elucidate the impact of race on each stage of the criminal process, from policing and prosecuting to jury selection, sentencing, prison conditions, and opportunities to reenter society. Including selections from critically acclaimed New Press books such as The New Jim Crow, Let’s Get Free, and Race to Incarcerate, alongside passages from other leading contemporary works, from Amy Bach’s Ordinary Injustice to Robert Perkinson’s Texas Tough, Blind Goddess provides easy access to a wealth of cutting-edge analyses and solutions. An essential volume for the general reader, Blind Goddess is also an ideal reality-check for students of criminal law.

The Blind Goddess: A Reader on Race and Justice

Papachristou, Alexander

The New Press

Brilliant essays from the renowned Nation columnist--aka the Mad Law Professor--tackling questions of identity, bioethics, race, surveillance, and more Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man's leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race. With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer's training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences--and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers. At the heart of "Wrongful Birth" is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child "comes out Black"; "Bodies in Law" explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And "Hot Cheeto Girl" examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny. In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman,&nbsp;The Miracle of the Black Leg&nbsp;offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide.

The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williams, Patricia J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Williams, Patricia J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williams, Patricia J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own

Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own

Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997 BBC Reith Lectures)

Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics

Alchemy of Race and Rights

Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor

The Rooster's Egg

The Rooster’s Egg

The Blind Goddess: A Reader on Race and Justice

The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law