Alchemy of Race and Rights [Hardcover]

Unfortunately, Williams cannot apply this to her own thinking. At times, she is downright offensive. I thought the clearest example of this was when she discussed Tawana Brawley. Brawley was discovered lying in garbage, scrawled with racial slurs. She implicated several individual men in her "attack." Ultimately, it came out that Brawley had dressed herself up to look as though she had been attacked, as a way to explain an extended absence to a violent and abusive stepfather.

Under the circumstances, I think it would be hard for compassionate people not to feel for Brawley. But Williams goes much, much farther. She implies that news reports indicating that Brawley's mutilation was a *self*-mutilation are not only irrelevant, but morally wrong in that they imply that Brawley is not a real victim. Yet those news reports were also *exonerating* the men Brawley had named as guilty!

The most amazing example of Williams's bizarre lack of compassion for the (white) men Brawley accused came when Williams attacked news reports saying Brawley "did it to herself" because they imply that "suicide" (she means self-mutilation more generally) is not a public concern. Two pages later, she notes as an afterthought that one of the men Brawley falsely accused killed himself as the accusation tore apart his life.

Self-mutilation is a public concern, when it's a black teen's, to the extent that reporters may not even point out that it is *self*-mutilation; suicide is not a public concern, when it's a white male's, to the extent that the press may not even report that the accusations which caused it were false.

Williams's arguments fall apart as soon as the situation gets complicated. At other times, her position just seems bizarre, as in her celebration of "Real White Men's Day."

Her PC-ness was also way over the top; when she mentioned a transsexual person, she felt inexplicably obligated to include the following sentence: "By no means do I want to imply, in my recounting of S., any implication that this was all there was to her story or that her story explains transsexuality: there is a whole range of transsexuality beyond S. herself, as well as an S. who exists beyond my limited characterization or experience of her." I could not find anything in Williams's discussion of S. which necessitated that sort of disclaimer.

In addition, Williams has an extremely unfortunate tendency to lapse into nonsense. Whole paragraphs would be clearly written, easily understood, and intelligent; unfortunately, they would invariably be followed by pages of what I can only describe as babble--to the extent that neither I, nor my mother (a much smarter woman than I) could actually parse the sentences to take a stab at what Williams might mean.

As one example of such a ridiculous sentence, here's a gem which is actually a quote; it's one of three hilarious paragraphs Williams quotes from Lacan: "It was inevitable that analysis, after stressing the reintegration of the tendencies excluded by the ego, in so far as they are subjacent to the symptoms that it tackled in the first instance, and which were bound up for the most part with the failures of Oedipal identification, should eventually discover the 'moral' dimension of the problem." I promise that the context does not make that sentence make sense.