Imaginary Citizens United….

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

Eggs Are People Too!

| March 21, 2012

It’s an interesting time to ponder the meaning of life and death in the eyes of the law. On one hand, Christian conservatives increasingly seek to sacralize embryos from the moment of conception. On the other, the Supreme Court just heard a case that, among other things, considers the extent to which the corporeal death of a parent is really the “end of the line” with regard to “survivor” benefits for children conceived by artificial insemination from the frozen sperm of a deceased father. On one hand, Citizens United granted First Amendment rights to corporations that are identical to—and some would say exceed—those of natural persons; on the other, the Second Circuit recently ruled that individuals, but not corporations, can be sued for human rights abuses.

It’s interesting to consider the larger social anxieties at play when it comes to the “right to life” debates. Rick Santorum recently made a great show for personhood amendments, declaring, “Personhood is defined as an entity that is genetically human and alive.” But unfertilized eggs are “genetically human.” And sperm swim, so technically they’re “alive.” (Or, as an irreverent friend suggested: fellatio must therefore be a form of cannibalism.) If egg and sperm are sacralized even before they meet, it goes a long way to explaining why the evils of contraception are back on the table.

But if we push this figuration only a little, “conceptually,” life begins with DNA. Conceivably, every cell in our body is brimming with generative potential, particularly given new technologies of assisted reproduction. Santorum’s stance thus becomes a peculiar cross between the theological imperative to be fruitful and multiply and the fetishism of microbiological cellular promise.

The oddity of this discourse is best revealed by a recent rash of satiric bills pressed by clever female legislators. Virginia State Senator Janet Howell wrote an amendment to the requirement that women be subjected to vaginal probe before being able to have an abortion: “Prior to prescribing medication for erectile dysfunction, a physician shall perform a digital rectal examination and a cardiac stress test. Informed consent for these procedures shall be given at least 24 hours before the procedures are performed.” (Her amendment was defeated, but by a satisfyingly narrow margin of 21 to 19.) In Oklahoma, Constance Johnson introduced the “anti-spillage” amendment, which holds that “any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

Frankly, I respect the Oklahoma Personhood Amendment’s proposal that life is sacred, “regardless of place of residence, race, gender, age, disability, health, level of function, condition of dependency, or method of reproduction.” But this expansive notion never seems to translate into policies that would provide actual food, shelter, healthcare or material succor for those precious lives, either pre- or post-birth. (In New Hanover, North Carolina, the County Board of Commissioners recently turned down a family healthcare grant, with one commissioner remarking that “if these young women were responsible people and didn’t have the sex to begin with, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”) Those claiming to give “voice to the voiceless” entities within the womb pit the interests of conceptual life against the bodies of living women. In any event, I’m not sure why regard for incipient humanity should make us feel bound to breed like bunnies within marriage or be constrained from copulating outside of it—particularly given that 99 percent of American women use some form of birth control.

At the same time, there are important principles being tested in these debates: the degree to which we feel sex to be a natural bodily function, whether pregnancy is always wholly a woman’s autonomous choice. Framed this way, our discussions of life and death seem oddly incoherent and disconnected. We love the very thought of life, but we disparage “anchor babies,” “welfare children” and teens of color like Trayvon Martin. We spend billions on fertility treatments for the wealthy but speak of pregnancy among the poor in terms of economic surplus, burden, free rider.

These discussions also vivify proxies of personhood in much the same way that corporations are enlivened: our updated Puritanism about reproduction is peppered with overly deterministic images of what DNA “says” and with marketed avatars of human perfectibility. Cytoplasm has been personified and given life and active voice; you’ve got to probe a woman’s body to see if there’s a separate life in there in need of rescue. You have to show her pictures of her blastodermic vesicles in case she doesn’t know.

Some anti-contraception arguments seem to cast birth control as actively harming real, microscopic little people, wee homunculi waiting to materialize, as though menstruation were a sinful waste. Eggs are people too! The maternal sanctity of the inspired neo-egg is posited in constant battle with the hot, sluttish moral disregard of any woman who has sex that is not at the behest of a husband’s procreative mission. Thus it is that Sandra Fluke becomes pluralized into all the women in her testimony; and all those women are reduced to a throbbing red light of a single really dirty body part.

But this is not mere political hyperbole. If we are not yet a theocracy, then it seems appropriate to observe that Santorum’s comprehensive invocation of “life” as a theological concept is, in the law, no more than a literary device—one that is employed when we construct legal fictions of all sorts. It is no different from granting “legal subjectivity” to a municipality or bestowing “personhood” on a corporation. This is not about what God endows. Rather, the law’s concern is what we as a constituted polity choose to animate and what we don’t. How “we the people” come alive in language, not merely in the womb, is the challenge of social justice: our love of life must not be locked away in the perpetually future contingent but fully engaged in the embodied present tense.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/166939/eggs-are-people-too

Culture of Death: Who Gets to Be a Person in Mississippi?

Patricia J. Williams 

The Nation Online,  blogpost of November 3, 2011 – 12:38pm ET, http://www.thenation.com/blog/164299/culture-death-who-gets-be-person-mississippi

On November 8, Mississippi is set to vote on Measure 26, a ballot initiative that would redefine the state’s Bill of Rights to extend the protections of personhood to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” It is striking that the measure, which is largely motivated by religious concerns about the sanctity of human existence, crops up in a state that has one of the lowest indices for overall quality of life—whenever it might begin—in the entire country: the infant mortality rate over the last decade is about 10 per 1,000 live births, with black babies dying at twice the rate of white babies. Mississippi leads the country in obesity and ranks forty-sixth in the number of state residents who have health insurance. It suffers from high death rates from cancer and heart disease. Twenty-three percent of the population lives below the poverty level, giving Mississippi the unenviable distinction of ranking dead last in the nation.

With the odds of survival so relatively skewed, it is no wonder that there might be some anxiety over preserving the very idea of life. Then, too, the legal category of “personhood” seems particularly capacious since Citizens United; if such a label protects corporations, banks and homeowners’ associations—and don’t they seem to be thriving!—what blessings might it extend to a zygote, that abstracted conception of future stock, human capital, mortal enterprise?

As I write, the seven billionth person is said to be entering this earthly dimension. That statistic has been reported with Malthusian apprehension, as well it might. The resources of the world are not infinitely replenishable; much of the planet’s ecology risks systemic collapse as a result of habitat degradation, global warming, invasive species and thoughtless exploitation; and the superpowers continue to go to war with one another over dismally non-sustainable energy sources like oil, gas and coal. Add in the uncertain-to-teetering economies just about everywhere, and it isn’t hard to fathom the dangerous contradictions of those who feel both deep resentment about the mad global competition to make ends meet, and simultaneously, a frantic “need” to propagate more of “our kind” because “we” are too few—regardless of actual numbers or common well-being. It’s as though we are walking a tightrope stretched between fetishism of the fetus and an abyss of human disposability.

When, during a recent Republican debate, the audience cheered the fact that Rick Perry had overseen more executions than any governor in modern history, there was at least a momentary shudder among the punditocracy. What did it mean that a numbered batch of bodies was cause for such applause? Perhaps this is the new metric for presidential success: executions and summary assassinations, as though the scales of justice were measured in people-poundage, with some being heavier or lighter, depending on strangely monetized equivalences. There have been too many events of late that have been framed by our political and media spokespeople as measured by some curious human exchange rate. Does the targeted killing of unindicted US citizens like Anwar Al-Awlaki and his 16-year old son “equal” resolution for the violence he may have preached? Does the grisly display of Muammar Qaddafi’s body flung in a refrigerated meat locker “account” for the lost lives in Lockerbie? And whether you deem the late Troy Davis guilty or innocent, his execution was a stark example of how much habeas corpus has been whittled away in recent years, his death an indirect product of curtailed access to judicial appeal and substantive justice—limitations that are justified with reference to “time spent,” and “tax dollars.”

Indeed, Davis’s legal representation was severely compromised by crippling cuts in state and federal funding for the Georgia Resource Center, which represented him and other indigent prisoners in post-conviction hearings. His appeal was also hobbled by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which prohibits prisoners from raising, post-conviction, evidence that they might have presented at trial, no matter how probative or substantive.

Embryos notwithstanding, we seem less and less invested in protections for the sanctity of life in the here and now. Can’t let things go on forever, after all. Costs a bundle.

Recently, the state of Texas decided to do away with the last meal for death row inmates, that terminal rite of agency, of choice, of taking leave of the sensory. From now on, the condemned will have to eat whatever hash is being dished up in the commissary. Of course, the tradition of granting requests in one’s last meal is premised on a superstition of sorts, a fiction of making peace, of showing mercy, of stilling spirit. In Louisiana’s Angola Prison, for example, the warden shares that meal with the doomed, a kind of final communion. In other places and times, a last drink or a coin to the executioner might serve as the bridge between life and impending death, a marking of the day as Unlike Any Other. The killing of a human being, whether considered legally justified or not, is momentous, mysterious, a repercussive tragedy no matter how reprehensible the record of that life. There will always be those who wreak havoc in society, and who then sneer from the grave or the brink of it; there is, no doubt, a very human urge to give them a little shove into the great beyond. But the entire purpose of just governance is to model respect and to provide restraint in the face of such urges.

When, instead, our government is viewed solely as something to protect “us” against “them” to the exclusion of it being a constitutive force as well, the social world turns into a zero-sum game, in which others’ success at survival means less for you. That mindset engenders a mean little flare of relief every time there’s news of one less ne’er-do-well post-born mouth to feed. That not-so-subtle channeling of emotion toward the facile rendering of death distracts us from the policy choices that might make life more tolerable—preventive healthcare, basic housing, public education—even in our unnatural numbers. It allows us to ignore the inconsistency between gracing the mute quiescence of a fertilized egg with personhood while failing to endow the more lively political quests of the American Dream.

The Legacy of Anita Hill, Then and Now

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

 

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Patricia J. Williams | October 5, 2011

Sad fact: there are few women of my generation who don’t have what is known as our “Anita story.” Mine occurred in 1980. I was five years out of law school and had decided to shift my career from practice to teaching. I was walking down a long hallway at the Association of American Law Schools meat market for new hires. There were two men behind me who were joking about the excellent shape of my legs and the unusually well-defined musculature of my lower quadrants. (Did I mention that it was a very, very long hallway?) At the end of that eternal passage was my appointed interview room. I escaped into it, only to be followed by the two. They, as it turned out, were doing the hiring.

Life was like that sometimes, I thought. And so I went through all the proper motions of expressing how much my fine ideas could contribute to their faculty, pretending that nothing had happened.

I didn’t stop pretending nothing had happened until 1991, when Anita Hill testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the unwanted office approaches of her boss, then-chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Clarence Thomas. I remember how still and dignified she was at the center of that howling hurricane of mockery, meanness and machismo. It was like some psychedelic cross between The Crucible and The Wizard of Oz, with its swirling fantasies of witchcraft, conspiracy theories and mad satyric orgies. I remember everyone from Orrin Hatch to Rush Limbaugh dismissing anything that “might have happened” as “bedroom politics,” even though Hill’s allegations centered on misbehavior in the boardroom, not the bedroom, and even though those allegations implicated precisely Thomas’s public ethics as the chief enforcement officer of sexual harassment laws. “He said, she said” entered the national vocabulary. So did “They just don’t get it.”

Anita Hill graduated from Yale Law School in 1980. The percentage of women in law schools was 38 percent—in contrast to the approximately
50 percent it is today. Back in those times there were so few women among the legal professoriate that many law schools didn’t even have women’s bathrooms. And as for women of color—there were only five or six of us teaching in the entire United States.

If the percentages of women in all professions improved over the next decade or so, the ability to speak up and speak out was often constrained by fear of losing status, ruining one’s career. It was the shockingly abysmal treatment of Anita Hill by the United States Senate that changed all that. Women were mobilized in a way unseen since the time of the suffragettes. EMILY’s List took off, as well as hundreds of networks for women’s political empowerment. Twenty years later, if some men’s behavior has not changed as much as one might have hoped, the collective women’s response has undergone seismic change. It’s not “nothing” anymore.

Anita Hill remains an icon to whom subsequent generations are rightfully indebted. At the same time, she has not remained trapped by her own symbolism or frozen in time. It is sometimes forgotten that she is a respected scholar of contract jurisprudence, commercial law and education policy. She is a prolific author, publishing numerous law review articles, essays, editorials and books. Today, Hill is a professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University. Much of her most recent research has been on the housing market, and her most recent book, published this month, is Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home.

It is ironic that the full substance of Hill’s remarkable intellectual presence remains so overshadowed by those fleeting, if powerful, moments of her Senate testimony. If the larger accomplishments of her life aren’t quite as iconic as that confrontation with Clarence Thomas, they nonetheless merit attention by feminists and scholars alike. To begin with, Hill is a remarkably elegant and accessible writer. For those who wish to apprehend the gravitas of her intelligence and dignity, Reimagining Equality would be a good place to start.

Some will remember that Hill was introduced at the 1991 hearings in the company of a large family—she is the youngest of thirteen children—but very little attention was paid to the significance of that protective wall of humanity. It helps, through this book, to have met Mollie Elliot, Hill’s determined maternal great-grandmother, born into slavery in 1847. It is instructive to read about how her grandfather fled Arkansas in 1914, narrowly escaping an old-fashioned, low-tech lynching. It is inspiring to know that her mother, Erma Hill, would have been 100 years old on October 16, and that “each day I honor her by working to live up to her dream that I will find a more just America than the one she lived in and that, as she did, I will leave it better than I found it.”

Despite this, Reimagining Equality is not principally a memoir. The arc of “home” ranges from her ancestors’ efforts at making their Arkansas farm a secure geographic space to her own settling in Massachusetts as the homesteading of an identity even more than of literal place alone. This trajectory is accompanied by a brilliantly lucid detailing of the apportionment of American real estate—and along with it, the American dream—along the lines of race, gender and class. While the most memorable heroines of this book are women who struggle to make a safe and nurturing domestic space of their own, the underlying narrative antagonism is rooted in a universal story that affects us all—of corrupt, downwardly spiraling land and banking practices that have disproportionately targeted women, minorities and the poor. From the 1800s to today, Hill meticulously tracks notions of communities split by the government’s investment in racialized redlining of neighborhoods; of encompassing traditions of maternity riven by neonatalist notions about which mothers should be having more or fewer babies; and of “ghetto lending practices” that have poisonously metastasized into today’s bundled subprime mortgage crisis.

Reimagining Equality is an important achievement. Hill manages to humanize and reinvigorate the American promise of security in one’s pride of home—even against the backdrop of harder-edged, more militaristically inflected calls to “homeland security.” The kinder, gentler complications that Hill brings to bear in teasing out this contrast are an eloquent continuation of her giving voice to the invisible, the voiceless, the undocumented, the hopeless and, yes, the all too literally homeless.

In 1991, Anita Hill made history by the simple yet terrifically courageous act of standing up to an arrogantly gender-biased political culture, as well as that part of “the public [who] rejected the testimony of my life experience.” Twenty years later, let us make sure that her written legacy is no less remembered than Thomas’s radically right-leaning Supreme Court opinions. Let us honor her by fully recognizing the liveliness of her ongoing cultural engagement: the excavation of a resonant equality that shimmers at the heart of the American dream, a light that demands its place as a beacon to all Americans, and beyond.

 

Tiresias Unbound…

Patricia J. Williams | June 1, 2011

When my son was 2, he went to a nursery school where he often played with a cheerful little girl I’ll call Jessie. Jessie’s parents dropped her off earlier than most of the other kids, and she was in the habit of standing by the door as others arrived, taking their lunchboxes and helpfully lining them up in the classroom’s big old refrigerator. As my son and Jessie became better friends, he began to imitate her every move. Every morning Jessie would stand on the right-hand side of the door taking lunchboxes; my son would stand on the left-hand side taking lunchboxes; and they would take turns running to and from the large, battered fridge.

I remember this ritual of theirs, however, not just because they were so gosh-darned adorable. I remember it because one morning the classroom teacher smiled warmly as they went through their identical paces and said, “Your son is such a sturdy little security guard! And Jessie, she’s our mini-hostess with the mostest!”

That story came to mind when I read about Storm, the 5-month-old baby who has become the center of an international controversy because the child’s parents have refused to reveal Storm’s sex. Kathy Witterick and David Stocker sent an e-mail to their circle of friends, saying, “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now—a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation.” In no time, that message went viral, showing up on The Huffington Post as well as radio, TV and in newspapers throughout North America.

The public response has been overwhelmingly negative. Although Kathy Witterick’s follow-up letter in the Ottawa Citizen made clear that Storm’s immediate family knows the sex, and that there are no secrets withheld from Storm’s siblings, most people have found it strange, “creepy” or “freakish.” On The View, Elisabeth Hasselbeck called it “a social experiment.” Others called for the couple’s children to be removed by social services.

While it seems to me that “not sharing Storm’s sex for now” is hardly a full-fledged commitment to lifelong gender suppression or neutered identity, I will leave to mental health experts the propriety of Storm’s parents’ stance. As a purely philosophical matter, however, the situation is intriguing. After all, it is a much under-interrogated political truism that “we’re all just people,” or “we’re all equal” or “it doesn’t matter what your religion is” or “I don’t see race.” Who cares about anything else if “we’re all American citizens”?

Yet when some intrepid souls actually follow such identity-erasing truisms to their logical, uncomfortable ends—refusing altogether to engage in the conventions of gendered identity, as with baby Storm—it is profoundly unsettling. We’re not supposed to talk—to think—about difference based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion et al. But that supposition holds only when the marks, the phenotypes, the stigmas, are clear—indeed so clear that all conversation coagulates around the dynamics of denial: “I didn’t notice you were black—what a reverse racist you are for labeling yourself!” “Why can’t you be like everyone else instead of flaunting your religion by wearing that khimar, that yarmulke, that bindi?” “If women want equality in the workplace, they should stop demanding womb-based privilege.”

Where, however, there is ambiguity, a switch gets flipped. If race or ethnicity is at all indeterminate, the first question is “What are you?” Where gender is not instantly discernible, anxiety or even rage ensues. We want our boxes, our neat cabinets of thought. When crowing over a newborn and asking, “Is it a boy or a girl?” we are not really in search of sexological or biological truth—for most purposes, it doesn’t really matter at such a young age.  What we really are seeking with that question is the satisfaction of our own eagerness to assign gender. The instant we know, we run out to buy blue rather than pink or dolls rather than trucks. The pitch of our cooing goes up or down accordingly. Gender, rather than sex, is a social response, embedded in our language, culture, education, ideology, vision. When my son and his friend Jessie went through exactly the same motions, it was gender assignment that led their teacher to describe them in such unconsciously distinct ways.

Our anxiety in response to Witterick and Stocker’s decision reveals a tension in our culture between the insistence on pinning down unknown aspects of another’s identity and the assumption that we don’t need to know anything about anyone except that they’re human. Indeed, if there is “a social experiment” being done, it surely also tests those of us beyond the Witterick-Stocker household. Spoken or unspoken, assigning identity is something we are always doing—in fact, we need to do so as to order our world. Yet we almost always do so without giving one whit of thought to all the underlying histories of assortment we imply; perhaps taking the occasional time out to review is not a bad thing.

And so we must find some way to speak of this child. If we don’t want to call Storm “it”—and really, we don’t—we have to call Storm, well, um, Storm. All the time. No shortcuts. In English, there is no adequately humanizing yet universal pronoun, no general reference to common humanity; in order to speak comfortably, we automatically must yield to the partitions of him, of her, of gender. In the absence of pronouns, address necessarily becomes specific, individual, even intimate.

What would it mean if we were forced to hold in abeyance that foundering loss we feel when we encounter the limits of the known? What if we had to sit—just “for now”—with the uncertainty that exists beyond the bounds of the normative, the easily colloquial? What if we had to greet one another with such boundary-muddling specificity that the hostess in the security guard and the security guard in the hostess were made manifest? Perhaps we should bring less panic to that moment of liminality and instead hold ourselves open to the wealth of possibilities.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/161079/are-we-worried-about-storms-identity%E2%80%94or-our-own

L’Affaire DSK

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

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 The Perp Walk That Demeaned Us All

Patricia J. Williams | May 24, 2011

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn first mulled over the idea of running for President of France, he professed concern that his vulnerabilities in the coming election would be the trifecta of “money, women, his being Jewish.” In the week since a housekeeper at New York’s Sofitel Hotel alleged that he assaulted and attempted to rape her, all three of those elements have converged to render any thought of a political future for Strauss-Kahn entirely beside the point.

On the surface, Strauss-Kahn’s troubles are all about “women.” He has long had a reputation for salacious advances. On one hand, therefore, it’s tempting to assume the present accusations fit him as “in character.” On the other hand, given his prominence and the seismic stakes for the European Union, his well-advertised randiness, in the opinion of many, renders him the world’s easiest fall guy.

On the surface, furthermore, the case can be framed as one individual charging another with sexual crimes, period. Strauss-Kahn has been arrested, pleaded not guilty, released on bail, put under house detention. Ostensibly, he will be presumed innocent until a trial allows all the facts to be presented in an orderly fashion, witnesses to testify, motives to be assessed, credibility to be evaluated, irrelevant and extraneous information to be barred from consideration.

Unfortunately, what has unfolded is not that simple. The international media frenzy has all but obliterated any space for a presumption of innocence; and it has relentlessly impugned both Strauss-Kahn and his accuser in broad, vulgar stereotypes—not only about sex, but about wealth, Guinean colonials, socialism, fame, French masculinity, American Puritanism, Muslim women, Jewish identity and Africans as bearers of HIV. It will be very hard to see justice done against a backdrop of so much roiling passion, rumor-mongering and pure projection. The deliverance of due process requires restraint, not just in the media but among the citizens of America and of the world. So I would like to offer some modest caveats as this case proceeds through the digestive tract of a world obsessed with celebrity dirt.

First, we do not know what happened. We can choose to believe what we want, but it serves no civic purpose to allow one’s personal hunches to stand in the way of being open to the specific evidence-based possibilities that will be presented in a court of law. For example, French intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy [1]’s publicly stated conviction that a proper first-class maid never cleans alone is spectacularly boneheaded. Even if it were true that housekeepers traveled only in “brigades,” it’s a generalization, a stereotype, irrelevant to whether DSK committed the crimes of which he is accused. At the same time, it is no less reflexively patronizing to conclude, as many women apparently have, that solely because the accuser is female or an immigrant or poor or Muslim or a widow that she could ever be anything other than truthful. And that is indeed all we know about her—that she is a poor Muslim widow from Guinea. Nor, of course, should we know much more about her identity, as a matter of due process. But, again, that process requires patience for victims’ stories to be played out in the appropriate place and time; it is not an invitation to plug the holes in our knowledge with bold imaginings.

Secondly, it is Dominique Strauss-Kahn who has been charged in this matter. It is not his wealth that is on trial, nor French effeteness or socialism or the International Monetary Fund. Rape and assault are committed by aggressors at every level of society—rich and poor—and on every continent. It is specious to opine, as did Ben Stein [2], that DSK couldn’t have done it because he’s a fat, old man and, besides, who ever heard of an economist being a rapist. It is just as specious to assume that he must have done it because all French men are supposedly sexist pigs. And it is nothing less than distressing to see racist speculation in the blogosphere that the accuser is “another Tawana Brawley”; or Ann Coulter’s twittered sneer that “DSK’s accuser is Muslim, he’s Jewish, so now DSK is claiming that he raped in self-defense.”

Thirdly, none of these observations preclude a clear, and clearly separate, analysis of misogyny in French or American political culture. Indeed, it’s well past time for French women to ratchet up the debate about their relative lack of representation in the highest echelons of power. The DSK affaire has elicited so much offensive commentary from prominent French personalities that an ironically nominated “marche des salopes” (or “slutwalk”) was organized in Paris to protest the prevalence of institutional gender bias. The casually medieval rationalizations for priapic behavior that have dropped from the mouths of the intelligensia are positively cringe-worthy: “le droit de jambage” (the right of the leg), “le droit de seigneur” (the right of the lord over his servant’s wife), “le troussage de domestique” (the right to fumble under the skirts of the help) and “un petit viol sympa” (a friendly little rape).

Fourthly, while it is better not to indulge in conspiracy theorizing, it is also good not to rule it out as impossible. Politics is a complicated, dirty business, as the impeachment hearings of President Clinton ought to have instructed us. (Who guessed back then that Newt Gingrich, while skewering Clinton’s morals, was cheating on his then-wife with his present wife?) For Americans, who by and large have never heard of DSK, the possibility of his arrest being a set-up is inconceivable. But in the immediate aftermath of his detention, a majority of French citizens believe he has been purposely brought down. Why? Dominique Strauss-Kahn was well on track not just to become France’s president but its first Jewish president. As head of the IMF, he led that institution in a distinctly progressive manner. He sharply critiqued corrupt American bankers and banking practices and, early on, predicted the collapse of the mortgage market. As a center-left Socialist party member, he was close to negotiating a European Union bailout for Greece. And his elimination from the election empowers the candidacy of Marine LePen, head of the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic National Front party, whose popularity, alarmingly enough, currently polls higher than that of Nicolas Sarkozy.

Finally, we should curtail the unseemly expressions of glee many American commentators have found in DSK’s lowered status. Rather than just condemning the crimes for which he has been indicted, the media condemns him for his wife’s inheritance; for his Porsche; for being a limousine liberal or a caviar socialist; for “pretending” to “spread the wealth” while wearing “$35,000 suits”; for flying first class; for having large and multiple homes; for owning more than one cell phone; and for being effetely French (Bon Dieu, we seem to hate the French!). A columnist in the Daily News derided [3] DSK’s very bearing because he “swung his arms as if he were striding down a corridor of power.” The New York Post went on to describe him as a “whiney fat cat,” the “jet-setting” “darling of the French left” who exudes “pompous arrogance.” According to the Post’s sources, “Cops ‘are not thrilled by the French idiot…’ ”

There’s an element of sadism in this sort of reporting that is troubling—rather like the partying at Osama bin Laden’s death. One doesn’t have to defend Strauss-Kahn’s alleged actions to reflect upon what reveling in his humiliation—the exuberant fun some people are having—says about us. While imprisoned on Riker’s Island, for example, there was a good bit of gloating about DSK’s having been “forced to cool his heels in the lockup,” as the NY Post put it. “The dingy digs, where prisoners are allotted $1.80 per meal, were a far cry from the $3,000-a-night luxury suite….”

No doubt. But that gap in accommodations says nothing about individual guilt or innocence. It does, however, reveal a deep resentment about class. At the same time, that bit of datum both highlights and obscures the alarming conditions in our jails and prisons, to say nothing of the way that class is also a cipher for race. Riker’s Island, one of the largest penal colonies in New York—or the world—has a daily population somewhere between 13,000 and 14,000. Most of those are pre-trial detainees, and 92 percent are black or non-white Latinos. In other words, the inmates at Riker’s Island are not convicts for the most part: they are arrestees waiting for trial. But because they are poor and cannot afford bail, the average length of their stay is fifty-one days [4].

The public mockery of DSK’s having to endure, for a couple of nights, the wretched toilets, the meager food, the “dingy” surroundings misses a deeper point: that there are thousands of other presumptively innocent-until-proved guilty people languishing in Riker’s stinking conditions whom we are also mocking, rendering invisible or summarily deeming deserving thereof. The too-easy revulsion at their poverty or race is in perfect counterpoint to the infuriated huffing about DSK’s fortune and nationality.

This concern is most efficiently symbolized in the indignities of the so-called “perp walk.” To American audiences, it’s become an unthinking ritual of police practice—parade the deliciously dastardly defendants. See Lindsay Lohan without her makeup! Mel Gibson with his eyes crossed! Charlie Sheen with a manic film of sweat! The French press was deeply unsettled to see their former finance minister dragged through a forest of photographers, rumpled, handcuffed and red-eyed. Some French analysts saw it as a kind of democratizing gesture, a bracing reminder that elites need to be taught that they’re just like everyone else. But I think the perp walk—a relatively recent product of voyeuristic reality TV shows like Cops—is undignified and humiliating for all defendants.

We should remember the great mistakes made in the name of perp walks: the Innocence Project has exonerated hundreds of defendants who “looked” guilty based on questionable metrics like “shiftiness.” When the prosecutor called DSK’s exit from the hotel the behavior of a man in a hurry, for example, NY Daily News columnist Michael Daly mused, “This is what you would expect your basic sex criminal to do.” For those of us old enough to remember the Central Park Jogger case, this is very close to the kind of generic categorization that allowed the jury to convict despite the thinnest of circumstantial evidence; and it was nearly two decades before those young men were finally exonerated by DNA evidence.

Hence, the perp walk is a social equalizer all right, but not in a good way. It’s a shaming ritual, rarely performed upon middle-class arrestees, and much more often upon the extremes of the class spectrum: either highly visible figures whose images may be sold at platinum prices to the likes of People magazine, or poor non-white denizens whose dark unhappy images evoke shock and horror in service to what author Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow.”

Given the fact that the United States—with more than 2 million bodies behind bars—leads the entire world in rates of incarceration, the perp walk is hardly the greatest icon of equal rights. It might be a wiser course if we think seriously about whether such habitual indignities might not endlessly and further instantiate a downwardly corkscrewed presumption of guilt that ultimately indicts us all.

Raising Hell…

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

 

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The Tiger Mama Syndrome

Patricia J. Williams | February 3, 2011

Amy Chua does not hold the patent on prejudice. There are lots of ways to spin a stereotype, and that she calls herself a “Chinese” mother in her hotly debated book on parenting, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, plays well against cultural anxieties about American economic status. But for heaven’s sake—the woman was born in Illinois!

No doubt that Chua and her daughters have put in the requisite 10,000 hours it takes to be fluent in any subject, but the Ivy League is chock-full of accomplished people who put in such hours. They come from all over the United States and all over the world. Some growing percentage of them are the products of yuppie, buppie, narcissistic helicopter parents—hockey dads, stage moms, the kind of people who would rather see their child drop dead of heatstroke while running a race than see that child give up. Like Chua, they do so in the name of all sorts of higher values—family honor, Catholic guilt, team spirit, Texan bragging rights, Jamaican superiority, Jewish destiny, women’s equality, Norwegian sang-froid, black pride, Hindu nationalism, immigrant striving, Protestant ethic, true grit. The world is a queasy, uncertain place right now, and what it takes to compete in the rat race exposes our kids to ever-increasing rates of depression, mental illness and substance abuse.

That said, the Ivy League is also home to a much larger group of people who work hard, who love their chosen pursuits, who are happily well-adjusted, yet who did not acquire their highly effective study habits by being turned out into the snow when they were 2 years old—a form of “discipline” Chua brags about. Some of them are even Chinese. Likewise, there are many Ivy Leaguers who do not believe that their accomplishment makes them less “American” or “Western.” They don’t spend time worrying, as Chua does, that if they “feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the US Constitution” they will be “much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice.”

So let’s not spend too much time wondering why Chua assigns her neurosis to her Chinese-ness rather than to her aspirational American upper-middle-class-ness. What I find more intriguing is not so much her obsession with academic success but her pathological yearning for dominance, control, standing and respect. Chua does not just want perfect scores; she is desperately afraid that she and her daughters will be drowned in the chilly goop of what she endlessly refers to as “decline.”

Chua’s fears are not confined by race, ethnicity or personal effort alone. After all, in Greece and France students have been rioting because of the rising costs of a good education and the paucity of jobs. In Akron, Ohio, an African-American tiger mother named Kelley Williams-Bolar was recently prosecuted for lying about where she lived so she could get her children into a decent school district. In California, immigrant kids of Mexican parents are battling for the right to pay in-state tuition at public universities. In Memphis there are fights about whether integrating a poor school district with a wealthier suburban one would constitute a “theft” of education. In London, a woman named Mrinal Patel was accused of fraud for misrepresenting her address so as to qualify her child for a better school. There are few places, in other words, where people are not worried about the quality of life and distribution of resources on a crowded planet.

At the same time, if Singapore, China and Hong Kong are producing a greater number of students with musical proficiency and excellent test scores, it’s because they have made huge public investments in education. They make musical instruments available to students—as the United States once did in the first part of the twentieth century. They have teachers certified in the subjects they teach—as was the case in Russian schools during the Sputnik era. “Westerners” are not nearly as lacking in work ethic as Chua maintains; but you don’t get to Yale if your elementary school has no books. You don’t rank first in the world in science if, as in the United States, 60 percent of your biology teachers are reluctant to teach evolution—and 13 percent teach creationism instead.

It would be so deliciously convenient if calling your kids “garbage”—another parenting trick Chua boasts about—actually turned them into little engines that could. But our larger educational crisis will involve a public investment that simply does not correlate with shooting down the self-esteem of children or disrespecting the “Western-ness” of the parents who struggle to raise them.

Finally, Amy Chua exhibits an excruciating self-consciousness about how she is seen in a racialized public imagination. She is riddled with angst about not betraying her status as a “model minority” who’s “supposed” to be smart in music, math and science. She even “disciplines” one of her daughters by threatening to adopt a “real” Chinese kid. Even as her narrative is swaddled in Dragon Lady analogies, every line is inflected by very American prejudices and divisive ethnic generalizations. Indeed, if you take away the peculiarly manic quality that is Chua’s alone, her anxieties are no different from a lot of “buffer” groups whose inroads on the edges of assimilation mark them, and whose successes are watched reproachfully, jealously by the larger society. The Kennedys walked this walk for the Irish. Fiorello La Guardia complained of it when he was the “breakthrough” Italian. Condoleezza Rice’s and Michelle Obama’s parents toiled and pushed for them in ways typical of a generation of civil rights babies. In other words, this tensely, needily overachieving mentality is hardly unique. It is not necessarily or even probably generated from Chua’s romanticized motherland. Our collective dilemma, and the most poignant challenge presented by her book, is how to survive in a world where the slightest nonconformity risks landing you outside—of a home, of a job, of a life—and left to stand by yourself, alone in the freezing cold.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/158285/tiger-mama-syndrome

 

Save the Children?

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Patricia J. Williams | December 2, 2010

‘Twas well after midnight when I came across some morsels of advice from the Ontario-based website familyadoptionplan.com. Under the listed advantages of international adoption is the proposition that “it allows adoptive parents to be matched with children that share their ethnic heritage…. It also allows socially conscious couples to bring a child into a much more advantageous and privileged living situation than would be possible in the child’s country of birth.”

Contrast that with the site’s description of domestic adoption: “One major drawback is that there is no guarantee that the child you want will end up being placed with you. Public adoption agencies serve the interests of the child, not the parents, and will always place the child in the situation they feel is best for him or her…. You must also accept that many children waiting to be placed…come from difficult backgrounds and may have been emotionally, psychologically, physically or sexually abused. Developmental delays and medical conditions…[are] a risk you have to assume as a prospective parent of a domestically adopted child.”

I spend a good bit of my professional life studying the ethics of adoption, and familyadoptionplan.com is hardly alone in its assumptions. There are at least 18.5 million children worldwide who have lost both parents, and their plight is largely shaped by North American parenting preferences. From the rushed airlifts of Vietnamese, Korean and Haitian babies (some who later turn out not to be orphans at all), to the rage for Chinese girls, to Madonna’s splendiferous beneficence—popular culture too often interprets international adoption through the lens of a “first world rescues third world innocents” narrative. What’s missing from this tidy plot is sensitivity to the social disruptions that render so many children homeless to begin with. Here are some thoughts about how to rechannel this mythology.

First, it would be helpful not to disaggregate international adoption from domestic (American) adoption. For example, there is a misperception that there’s a “baby shortage” in the United States. This is true only if one modifies the term to mean “healthy white newborns.” There are tens of thousands of adoptable domestic children of color. The silence about their plight allows many to imagine (a) that American adoption practices are irreproachably race-neutral; (b) that all children in the developed world are better off than anyplace else in the world (when, in fact, we have just about the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation); and (c) that our culture of adoption is unassailably moral.

The plight of homeless children in war-torn or poverty-stricken places is surely heartbreaking. And relatively speaking, children in the industrialized West are many times better off than the average child in Sierra Leone. But let’s not confuse “helping” global crises with the individual decision to adopt a child. We have an international crisis of child protection; but that’s not something that adoption alone, or even primarily, can fix. It’s just not a great idea to adopt a child because you want to end war or cure world hunger. Maybe you should work for an NGO instead or help plow a field. Such efforts are often undervalued, but they contribute significantly to the betterment of dispossessed children.

To posit adoption as “rescue” from turmoil risks inflecting the personal family dynamic with missionary smugness in a way no child should be asked to endure. For example, if you adopt your nephew and raise that child with the message that you are Mother Teresa for having taken him in and that he’s ever so lucky to have been rescued from sluttish “Aunt Sally”… Well, it’s got to be hard for a kid not to feel ambivalent about the part of himself that is born of Aunt Sally. Similarly, in many international and interracial adoptions, kids are raised to look down on their origins and “feel lucky”—to their documented distress.

Furthermore, adoption has become a form of trafficking in and of itself. The exchange of money, though facilitated by public policy, is particularly evident in the private adoption context. This commodification allows too many to think it is appropriate to “return” adopted children when problems arise, like so many damaged goods.

One can also observe here a fluctuating eugenic value system. If China values boys over girls, Americans choose girls over boys, no matter where they’re from. Color-ism and fad figure prominently in this perverse ranking, with prospective parents seeking kids from Eastern Europe, Africa and South Asia according to cultural images about who is more “like” whom, who is “born smart,” who is prettier, who “exotic.” But Angelina Jolie’s influence notwithstanding, the day-to-day discomfort we have talking about race and ethnicity ultimately leads to the conclusion that a healthy domestic black child must be harder to live with than a catatonic child from a Romanian orphanage.

Finally, the issue of international adoption needs to be examined alongside the developing market for assisted reproduction. More women are seeking in vitro fertilization or are using surrogates (often dark-skinned surrogates in the third world). Assisted reproduction is a well-funded industry that thrives on the idea that family is biological, or that women who are “desperate” to have children can do so only through “their own” eggs or, even better, “designer eggs.”

In truth there is a “wealth,” not a shortage, of children who need homes. Yet we seem to be narrowly rebiologizing “family” precisely at a moment when we should embrace our common humanity. Without a basic assumption that all the world’s children are “our own,” we’ll never get past that unspoken sense of exoticism and boundary that fuels consumerism and neglect in the social sphere—or solipsism and disappointment in the personal.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/156796/save-children

 

She-Lawyers and Other Improbable Creatures

Patricia J. Williams

May 20, 2010   |    This article appeared in the June 7, 2010 edition of The Nation.

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As we get closer to the hearings on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, I expect we will have to endure yet another season of vulgar sexism. Sonia Sotomayor had to refute allegations that she was too strident and bossy; Kagan is already facing speculation that she’s a lesbian—in that unfortunate schoolyard universe where, as with Hillary Clinton before her, “lesbian” is defined only as “unwomanly.” This has nothing to do with Kagan’s actual sexual orientation, whatever it might be; rather, I believe it is testament to the work that remains to be done. Forty years after the birth of modern feminism, we are still not able to think about women who attain certain kinds of professional success as normatively gendered.

Officially, the English language does not have gendered nouns. Yet it seems that we do invest certain words with gendered exclusivity—nurse, fireman, CEO, lawyer—if only as a matter of general parlance. There’s a story that used to be ubiquitous about thirty years ago: a father rushes his son to the hospital after a bicycle accident. The boy is whisked into Emergency and ends up on the operating table. The surgeon looks down at the boy and gasps, “Oh, my God! This is my son!” The story would end with the question, “How is that possible?” Much puzzlement would ensue until the “Aha!” moment: the surgeon was the boy’s mother. In that era, the likelihood of a surgeon being female was so negligible that divining the answer became a kind of “test” of radical feminist sensibility.

This story is interesting not merely for what it reveals about embedded sexual stereotypes; it also tells us that these stereotypes are not written in stone. If the notion of a female surgeon is inconceivable to a particular audience within a certain time frame, it is surely the product of history, politics and practice. Thus stated, it would appear that a significant shift in the number of women in medicine would change those perceptions, challenge the underlying assumption. Similarly, in a field like law, where about half of law students are women, one would anticipate that their sheer numbers would render their presence a nonissue.

If, however, the very word “surgeon” or “lawyer” is still unconsciously gendered, then integrating medical and law schools will be a much more layered project. If that is the case, then we’re battling not just the on-the-ground challenge of getting women into medical school but also the conceptual difficulty of allowing them to be surgeons and women simultaneously. This latter problem depends on how deeper levels of culture and meaning are processed and understood.

The blogosphere is ablaze with comments about how Kagan does her hair or whether she wears pants (Hillary Clinton was married, so she was accused of “wearing the pants in the family”). This chatter isn’t really about Kagan’s sexual preference as much as it is about whether she exhibits masculine traits. The interrogation is not limited to her style or fashion sense but, as with Sotomayor, is about her personality and hobbies. She likes poker! She swings a softball bat! Not only does anything she touches suddenly get characterized as a male pursuit; she is amply endowed with a Midas touch of testosterone. Success itself is masculinized.

Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive psychologist at Stanford University, studies whether the languages we speak shape the way we think. She has showed empirically that lexical or syntactic differences affect how we think about objects or concepts. For example, in German the word for “bridge” is feminine; in Spanish, French and other Romance languages it’s masculine. Boroditsky has shown that in German, native speakers tend to describe bridges as elegant or beautiful, whereas Spanish or French speakers generally refer to a bridge in masculine terms: as strong and massive and muscular. They don’t just speak of the bridge as such—they think of it as such; they feel it as such.

English speakers might anticipate that the power of such cognitive categorizing would extend to us through other kinds of expressive traces. Perhaps it ought to prompt us to interrogate historically raced or gendered words—if not nouns generally, then particular professions dominated by totemic phenotypes: where “lawyer” is masculine or “nurse” is feminine, or “president” is white and “alien” is brown.

Similarly, there is research to suggest that even races are gendered in our culture. Psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff has done studies showing that blackness tends to be hypermasculinized while Asian-ness tends to be hyperfeminized. This means not just that black men are seen as more masculine than other men but that black women, too, are perceived as more masculine than other women and are more often mistaken for being male. Likewise, not only are Asian women perceived as hyperfeminine; Asian men are seen as much more feminine than other men. This kind of invisible taxonomizing may lead one unconsciously to think of, say, a black woman in a formal evening gown as “funny looking” or as though she were in drag. It may lead one unconsciously to look at an Asian man in a law firm as not strong enough to lean on the big difficult client. Even when we are committed to diversifying the workplace, we cannot ignore the deeper, subtler resistance to anything or anyone who looks “out of place.”

Of course, a good part of the drubbing Elena Kagan will face is calculated politics as usual. But I think the very persistence of narratives of unwomanliness with which to browbeat women in public or professional life suggests that the quest for integration, equality and political legitimacy is linked to problems of cognition, language and culture. It also suggests that we might want to incorporate some of this new knowledge into our strategies for overcoming social disparities and glass ceilings.

Patricia J. Williams

May 20, 2010   |    This article appeared in the June 7, 2010 edition of The Nation.

Sonia Sotomayor

A Persistent Pioneer

by Patricia J. Williams

May 26, 2009 | 11:35pm

Reuters Obama’s powerhouse Supreme Court pick will be confirmed, The Daily Beast’s Patricia J. Williams writes. But that doesn’t mean the battle over Sotomayor’s “bullying” temperament and breadth of experience won’t be bruising.

 

President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor just plain fills me with delight. She’s brilliant, she’s fair, she’s an inspiration on many, many levels. That she is the first Puerto Rican or Latina nominee, appointed by the first Afro-Hawaiian-Kansan-Kenyan-American president, just makes this moment all the more extraordinary in our history.

But the trajectory of Judge Sotomayor’s career owes much to the collective efforts of the civil-rights movement, in its most encompassing sense. Now 54, she came of age when doors were just opening to allow significant numbers of women, Latinos, or any other sort of minority into the legal profession. I’m three years older than Sotomayor, and when I started teaching in 1980, there were six women of color in the entire United States in legal academia—four African Americans, one Asian American, and one Latina. Our numbers in the judiciary were just as sparse. So Sotomayor is among that generation of often lonely but extraordinary and persistent pioneers.

I’m confident she’ll be confirmed. At the same time, I am bracing myself for the predicted battle, some degree of which I’m already seeing in the media—to wit, commentary about her being “strident,” or “bullying,” when all examples of such seem to fall well within what any male judge would be embraced for as “decisive” rather than “opinionated. ”

On Tuesday morning I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC radio and a lawyer called in to complain that Sotomayor once told counsel that his brief was one of the worst she had seen and verged on the unprofessional. The caller fumed that this proved her unsuitability to serve on the highest court.

I’m sorry, but this felt like pure sexism to me. Who would ever question a male judge’s authority to declare that a brief was below par? What does it imply about her perceived credibility as “judge” that her indisputably measured declaration of substandard performance (no yelling, no posturing, just a simple declarative sentence) becomes turned into an indictment of her “temperament”?

Another thing I’m struck by is how much the media confine her “experience”—as though it were not a source of legitimate, professional information. They keep using the word “experience” in an entirely romantic way—like George Jefferson, “moving on up” from the cotton fields of the South Bronx. But the compelling weight of her experience is revealed in her résumé: summa cum laude from Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review. This much alone is no easy feat. It’s a unique and extraordinary accomplishment for anyone: male, female, white, Latina, rich, or poor.

But also she has a variety of practical experience under her belt, experience as a prosecutor, experience as trial judge, experience as corporate lawyer, experience as an appellate judge. Very few on the Supreme Court have ever enjoyed this breadth of experience.

So rather than localizing this as something internal to her—some kind of Kumbaya, “walking in the moccasins of the downtrodden” thing—let’s get a grip and remember that “experience” means her résumé. And when it comes down to the objective litany of her accomplishments, Judge Sonia Sotomayor is both a legal powerhouse and an American dream come true.

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-26/a-persistent-pioneer/p/

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Obama’s First 100 Days

 

 

The Looming Backlash

by Patricia J. Williams

April 29, 2009 | 3:18pm

Joe Raedle / Getty ImagesPresident Obama’s first 100 days may have been a success, but the forces gathering against him are only gaining steam.

The first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency have been as flawless as any transition of such complexity could ever be. He’s a brilliant man, and he’s made brilliant choices very much in accord with his campaign promises. But why the pressure to judge him after only 100 days? I’d give him the first 270 days. That’s the length of your average pregnancy and anybody knows it takes 270 days to give birth to something of significance. Obama has laid the groundwork for greatness, but remediation for problems of the scale he’s confronting will take time. An assessment of his impact now—whether on the economy, health care, the courts—is a little premature.

The real test for Obama will be in negotiating some degree of backlash. As the pain of reduced circumstances and unemployment touches more and more lives, the search for scapegoats is likely to become bitter. I’d like to see what happens in a few months as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney become increasingly vociferous on Fox News. I’d like to see how much more life pundits give to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s threat to secede, or Representative Michelle Bachman’s characterization of her service in Congress as akin to being a “foreign correspondent” behind “enemy lines.”

Long-term, much of Obama’s success is going to depend on what happens with the courts. Issues ranging from state regulation of discriminatory lending practices to the extension of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act will be decided by the Supreme Court in the near future, and the current court is quite conservative. Moreover, at least three-quarters of the entire federal bench has been appointed by Republican administrations. Obama’s policies will be constrained and challenged by this reality, and it’s unclear how or if he can work around it.

The clearest success of President Obama’s first 100 days has been at the symbolic level. By firmly rejecting policies on torture, he’s undone much of the negative image of the United States with which the Bush administration left him. He’s also given many of us hope for a new era in race relations. (At the same time, we must remember that it is just that a hope, not yet a reality. Our sense of promise should not be used to undermine civil-rights protections or to underestimate the racial divisions that remain unaddressed, whether disparities in disease control, incarceration rates, education, or homelessness.) Finally, the Obama family has modeled a refreshing kind of American elegance: fashionable, fit, and frugal. As parents, they have rotated the duties of family and career with equal devotion and equal accomplishment. As partners, they are equally well-educated, outspoken, and poised. They have incorporated a grandmother into the definition of family, put a basketball court in the basement and planted vegetables amid all those ornamental tulips. The White House has never been cooler; and it has never been warmer..

Patricia J. Williams is the author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster’s Egg; and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. She is a also a columnist for The Nation.