Patricia J Williams
Page 2
guardian.co.uk
Williams sees it as "an
unprecedented merger between the functions of intelligence
agencies to foresee crimes, and law enforcement to punish
crimes." She feels "advantage was taken of the times" to push
through the 342-page [Patriot] act. "It swept into force, but it's an
intricate act; it wasn't devised just in the wake of September 11.
It satisfied ideological pressures from the right that in calmer
times would have been resisted. As a lawyer, I'm a great admirer
of the constitutional balance; both the USA Patriot Act and the
executive order establishing military tribunals threaten that
balance."
Why then, though there is growing protest from lawyers and civil
liberties groups, has outrage been so muted? The Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz has even argued that torture should
be permissible under special warrants, in cases where time is of
the essence - a supposed "ticking time-bomb" scenario - while a
CNN poll after September 11 found 45% of Americans would not
object to torturing someone if it would provide information about
terrorism. Williams hints at a reason other than simple fear: it
may be easier for some traditional liberals to believe that only
those who have something to hide have anything to fear. They
belong to a "class of those who have never been harassed, never
been stigmatised or generalised or feared just for the way they
look," she says. "They feel this will never be levelled against
them - though that's fraying at the edges with airport security."
Now, well-dressed professionals are themselves a "suspect
class".
Williams grew up without such illusions. She was born in
Boston in 1951, into the only black family in a "white,
working-class neighbourhood". Both her parents were
college-educated; her mother was a teacher, her father a
technical editor. From her maternal grandmother and great aunts
Williams learned that the family had "escaped from plantation
society in Tennessee, where the families that owned our family
were still in charge". Her grandmother fled with her sisters to
Boston, "perceived as the cradle of the abolitionist movement".
Many of their neighbours were recent immigrants - Russian,
Portuguese, Irish, Italian and German. "I grew up very aware of
parallels between the black struggle for civil rights in the south
and pogroms in Russia, or the British treatment of the Irish," she
says. "Each of my neighbours had a story." Her aunt was a
journalist, "one of the first UN correspondents; she was
definitely the most romantic member of my family. Through her, I
had a tremendous sense of what the world could be."
The family joined the civil rights movement and the National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. She was
"taken out to march before I could read". They were "tumultuous
times; Boston was far from the south, but the news was
everywhere. I was tormented; stones were thrown and there was
name-calling." When a few black families moved into the
neighbourhood, "the area changed overnight. Whites who had
seen me born and baked me cookies at Halloween and grown
up with my mother now fled for their lives." She sees the
resulting de facto segregation as "part of the first great backlash
to the civil rights movement", the second being a move against
equal opportunity "disguised as a fight about reverse
discrimination and 'quotas'."
Williams was expected to become a school teacher, one of few
professions open to black women. But as a first-generation
"affirmative action baby", she found law school was now open to
her. "I grew up when the laws of Jim Crow were being overturned
by lawyers going to court, all the way up to the supreme court;
they were appealing to the constitution, arguing that this was
not American. I developed a sense of possibility." Yet she had
reason to beware of the law. She tracked down the contract of
sale for her great-great-grandmother, Sophie, who was bought at
the age of 11 and soon after impregnated, by a white slave
owner named Austin Miller, who was anxious to increase his
"stock".
Miller, Williams's great-great-grandfather, was also reputed to be
one of Tennessee's finest lawyers. "The manipulation of law has
been responsible for some of the worst tragedies in American
history," says Williams, mindful of how her ancestor was listed
as property by age and sex, not name, and how the law
underpinned slavery as well as Jim Crow segregation. "The
appeal to law is far from perfect. But it's one of the better ways
to resolve aggression and injustice. I see no other way."
At Wellesley College in the late 1960s and early 1970s, "people
wanted to invite you home for the specific purpose of shocking
their parents". Students' brothers would date her "out of
solidarity", while playing the Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar. It was
an "all-girls school with a reputation for being terribly refined, and
training many women in positions of power; it was a wonderfully
protected environment at a time when women weren't taken
seriously as scholars." By contrast, her class at Harvard Law
School in the mid-1970s was only 8% women. Old-boy
networking and humiliating initiation rites were rife. "There were
rituals and inner circles, cigars to be smoked. It was my first
taste of what it meant to have your opinion weigh less than
men's. I learned to roll with the punches. You had to fight hard
just to be heard."
Williams worked in consumer protection at the city attorney's
office in Los Angeles, and the Western Centre on Law and
Poverty, but left out of frustration. "I loved practising as a trial
lawyer, but I burned out. Many of my clients in LA were
Mexicans, but [President Ronald] Reagan limited the ability to
represent undocumented persons; I felt I needed to write, not
just argue their cases in court."
As a law teacher, Williams found herself the first
African-American, or the first black woman, at each of the
colleges where she was hired. She soon gained a reputation for
"troublemaking". Williams wrote: "I don't think I am either
remarkable or a troublemaker . . . My attempt to share the
insights of women, of people of colour, of a certain degree of
powerlessness is what human beings do - they bring their
insights and sensibilities along with their physical presence.
And if women enter environments where men have only been
talking to men, the conversation is bound to change." She kept
a journal, and shared it with students. "Many women would
come to me, trying to make the institution more responsive."
The Alchemy Of Race And Rights grew from those journals.
Her work has been criticised for being personal and anecdotal.
"This emotional stuff leaves me cold," one male colleague
remarked. "It's not how I teach contract law or bring a piece of
litigation." She laughs. "I don't write briefs like that when I'm
representing a client. I don't see my writing as subverting law as
it's practised, though it may challenge people to be more
creative." She adds: "I wrote at a time and to an audience when
the first person was strictly forbidden. But an individual story can
be enormously informative. I go back and forth between the
abstract and the personal."
She often writes of her son, whom she adopted "after an
engagement broke off; I walked into an adoption agency on my
40th birthday, thinking, it's now or never". Though she
anticipated refusal "because I was single and 40", she
expressed no racial preference, and soon had a two-day old
boy. "There's a seven-year wait for 'healthy white newborns', but
a shortage of parents prepared to adopt black children," she
says. "I had my son, sweetly, in nine months." As for men, "I
haven't had the time. Parenting keeps you busy. When I've
taken care of my son's needs, and as he grows, I might don
parrot feathers and a pair of red mules, and hit the social circuit.
Right now, life is quiet."
She took time out from teaching partly because of the death
from cancer of her brother-in-law, who was also, like her sister, a
lawyer. "We were all together at law school," says Williams.
"He was a very hard-working corporate lawyer and exemplar of
that great Puritan American virtue, delayed gratification. He kept
saying he'd take a holiday. I began to reflect on how short life
is." She travelled to South Africa, the Caribbean and Europe,
and lectured across the US, while "home schooling" her son and
writing a fortnightly column in Nation magazine, Diary Of A Mad
Law Professor.
"Much of what gets resolved in legal cases is filtered through the
mass media, and often the law is trumped by public opinion,"
she says. "The dry questions of law are important to our judicial
system, but in heated cases - from OJ to the Enron scandal -
people don't want to hear. Increasingly, I've turned to journalism,
where I get a huge response." She writes that "Americans
suddenly seem willing to embrace profiling based on looks and
ethnicity, detention without charges, searches without warrants,
even torture and assassinations." While she is heartened by
legal challenges to such steps, her aim is to stir wider debate. "I
recognise I live in a democracy and I'm in a minority. The
majority support Bush - but perhaps without understanding
everything that's at stake."
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