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

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

 

Marvels, Madness, Medicine

by Patricia J. Williams

Released: 7 Oct 2010

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In the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Policy History, Susan Reverby, a historian at Wellesley College, will publish a paper detailing a particularly sordid moment in American history. From 1946 to ’48, the Public Health Service, with the assent of some Guatemalan officials, engaged in medical experiments on 700 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, mental patients and children. The documents Reverby discovered show that doctors intentionally sickened many of their subjects with syphilis, either by injecting infected fluids into their spines and under their skin or by supplying them with afflicted prostitutes.

Of course, this horrendous project arose from “the best of intentions” — to improve serological testing for the disease and to measure the degree to which penicillin and other medicines could act prophylactically. The US military was also interested in finding STD protections for soldiers that might be simpler and less painful than those available at the time. Ultimately, the observations in Guatemala were inconclusive because it proved harder than anticipated to infect sufficient numbers to constitute an adequate data set.

The doctor in charge of the two-year project was John Cutler, an assistant surgeon general who, in his later years, was a “beloved” professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. It was in his archives that Reverby found notes and photographs documenting the existence of the project. Even before this revelation, however, Dr. Cutler’s long-term legacy was one of infamy: He was one of the main researchers in the Public Health Service’s Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which black sharecroppers went purposely untreated from the 1930s to 1972, when the project finally was exposed. In 1944, moreover, Dr. Cutler directed a study in which gonorrhea was injected into prison “volunteers” at the state penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. And in 1953, after returning from Guatemala, he resumed his experiments with syphilis injections, this time with prisoners in Sing Sing prison in New York.

Dr. Cutler’s experiments, while horrific, were not unique. Nonconsensual medical experiments were a prominent feature of South Africa’s apartheid regime. In America, we know about the military’s experimentation with atomic radiation on unwitting soldiers and patients from the 1950s to the ’70s and experiments with LSD in the ’70s. In the ’90s New York City foster children were used to test the effects of certain unlicensed drugs for AIDS. And let’s not forget all the “tests” done at Guantánamo Bay.

It’s important to understand how we repeatedly deceive ourselves into appalling forms of corruption by wrapping ourselves in the language of high standards. Reverby cites a telling quote from the 1967 autobiography of virologist Thomas Rivers: “I tested out live yellow fever vaccine right on my ward in the Rockefeller Hospital. It was no secret, and I assure you that the people in the New York City Department of Health knew it was being done…. Unless the law winks occasionally, you have no progress in medicine.” Rationalization has ever been thus: It’s humanitarian in the long run. We confuse, in other words, motives and means.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum posits three contexts in which nonconsensual medical experimentation took place in Nazi Germany: first, in military organizations, premised on rationalizations of security, exigency and defense; second, in the hunt for new pharmaceuticals and treatment methods; third, in conjunction with ideologies of racial, ethnic or religious superiority in which “common sense” dictates that some humans are less valuable than others and can be sacrificed for the “greater good.” The moral lesson of the Guatemalan experiment ought to spur public conversation and review of all these areas. My list of topics would include:

1. Despite more encompassing interpretations of the Biologic and Toxin Weapons Convention, we are increasingly converting academic research facilities into biodefense containment labs. A 2004 American Journal of Public Health article points to “inadequately characterized risks,” as well as concern that the program is informed by a “political rather than health agenda.”

2. The weakened condition of the FDA means that many drugs have been inadequately vetted before coming to market. The scandals involving Vioxx and Avandia are great failed experiments inflicted on a trusting, unsuspecting public.

3. Pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists are investing in miracle drugs and testing by seeking out very poor people as “volunteers” in exchange for “medical treatment” or for token amounts of money that are dwarfed by the health risks involved.

4. Our consent procedures must be scrupulously overseen and updated, particularly where “volunteers” are used in places like prisons, mental health institutions, foster care or orphanage settings or on populations living under oppressive regimes. (As Reverby points out, Guatemala in the ’40s was essentially run by the United Fruit Company.)

5. Germ line therapy and genetic manipulation will increasingly implicate future generations. We must ask ourselves if our present zeal for “transhuman,” “gen-rich,” “enhanced” versions of ourselves is but a vast experiment in narcissism.

Scientific revolution always tempts us with blinding hubris. How else could Dr. Cutler engage in experimentation at the same time as and of the very sort for which the United States was prosecuting Germans in Nuremberg? So while President Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton issue formal apologies to the people of Guatemala, we must interrogate our own freighted contemporary moment — of economic desperation, of rising nativism, of promises of hellfire to come, of soaring incarceration rates. These are divisions that have never been exploited to any good or decent end.

Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column “Diary of a Mad Law Professor.” Her books includeThe Rooster’s Egg (1995) and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997).

Copyright © 2010 The Nation — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 October 2010

 

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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Copyright © 2009 The Daily Beast

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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.

Das Gesang

 

I know those sneers. I’ve heard them too

Susan Boyle’s worldwide fame is a triumph for all those who have ever been judged by appearances

• The Observer, Sunday 19 April 2009

The first email about Susan Boyle was forwarded to me by a friend who works for a human rights organisation. Her message fumed that Boyle had been “disrespected as a woman”. The second email came from a retired neighbour who was unnerved by the ageism on display from Simon Cowell and the other judges. The third was from a vegan who despises the cosmetics industry for experimenting on animals and was delighted that Boyle hadn’t worn a speck of make-up that anyone could tell. The fourth was from a law school classmate who saw her success as the apotheosis of a just order, the fifth from an Indian friend who deemed it a liberatory moment for persons of low caste.

Tears, delight, awe. We’ve all seen our portion since Boyle marched on to the stage ofBritain’s Got Talent, did that cheerful little hip roll and opened her mouth to sing.

The enchantment she generated – 20 million hits so far – is largely attributable to her heavenly voice. But the great hook of the YouTube clip in its entirety is that glorious voice rang as ultimate reprimand. Boyle is a phenomenon because she acquitted herself with such dignity even as the judges treated her with such hostility and open condescension.

Her supposedly “unlikely” triumph has all the elements of a compelling fairy tale: vulnerable virgin, the unassuming frock from another era, bullies straining like hellhounds at their chains, a cat named Pebbles no less, and a throbbing heart of purest gold. Indeed, YouTube’s opening image of Boyle innocently, hungrily, consuming a sandwich in the background of the green room is nothing less than the modern equivalent of Cinderella smudged with cinders.

My fairy tale construction of Boyle’s performance idealises her as a black American woman revealed as princess. I know that must sound like a stretch, but as a black American woman, I live in a world where the colour of one’s skin is at least as powerful an indicator of status as whether Boyle wore open-toed white heels with sheer black hosiery and let her hair go grey.

So to me there’s an important link among the otherwise incoherent metrics of race, class, gender, age and so forth. Boyle’s ability to up-end conventional preconceptions is akin to what the “black is beautiful” movement of the 1970s tried to accomplish: a debunking of surface-based biases in favour of deeper commitments to fairness, intelligence, courage, humility, patience, re-examined aesthetics and the willingness to listen.

I grew up in a culture of racial hierarchy, where being black and female automatically meant that you were oxen-like, stupid, undesired. Such measures are insidiously, seductively easy and they are powerful; hence I spent my life grasping for that Susan Boyle moment when I might open my mouth and rock the world to its foundations. Yes, I admit, this is an impossibly romantic figuration. But this dreamy yearning for visibility is what purchases communion with those millions of Boyle’s other fans, still rapidly increasing.

Boyle’s rendering of I Dreamed a Dream was a powerful artistic comeback to the smirks with which she was greeted. But unlike a fairy tale, her story continues to unfold in real time, and whatever magic she deployed to wipe the contempt off the judges’ faces for a few seconds began to diminish as they regained their composure.

“When you stood up there with that cheeky grin, everyone was laughing at you,” marvelled Piers Morgan, with vulgar grandiosity and encompassing certainty. “Everyone was against you,” agreed Amanda Holden, with sympathetic cruelty. “You’re a little tiger, aren’t you?” simpered Simon Cowell.

Then began what quickly turned into a mighty media river of faint praise. Good Lord, no one would have ever guessed it! Just goes to show you can’t judge a book by its cover! How “surprisingly” wonderful she was on the inside, particularly given, ahem, the outside!

For all Boyle’s success, this relentless narrative of “who’d have thought it” must be painful. One of the loveliest aspects of Boyle’s demeanour was how straightforward, lively and confident she was. I should think it might be hard for her ever to be so unaffected again. Cowell and his snarky team hold up a distorting mirror that is often quite irresistible; it invites its victims to internalise the unkind gaze of the supercilious. Thus is born the etiology of embarrassment. Did Boyle really see herself as old, dowdy, unfashionable and undesirable until she was told so, in public, in no uncertain terms?

In subsequent television appearances, Boyle has been made up, gussied up, fluffed, coiffed and crimped. Debates rage about whether she should stay the way she was at the magic moment of first discovery, forever the ugly duckling on the cusp of swanhood. I am not one who believes that she must never change – it seems rather inevitable, for better or worse. But the reason Boyle is a heroine has little to do with her transforming any aspect of herself. Rather, it was she who transformed the audience, it was she who challenged their beliefs.

Boyle’s lesson is not that she is a book whose “cover” deceived people. That’s as crass as the supposedly well-meaning comments I sometimes heard growing up: that I might look black on the outside, but I was nice and white inside. Rather, the problem was the audience’s self-deception. Dismissing her – or anyone – based on careless expectations about what age or lack of employment supposedly signify is the habit of mind common to all forms of prejudice.

Those who lead us to that understanding open our hearts to the most sublime sense of connection. It’s why many of us didn’t just cheer when Barack Obama was elected, but wept like babies. And when Boyle sang, we didn’t just root for her, we wept for all the slights that ever were.

So Boyle should be able to wear what she wants, whether a canvas feedbag or an evening gown. The true measure of her success must be our gratitude for the mirror she held up to us.

• Patricia Williams is professor of law at Columbia University

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Mrs. Obama Meets Mrs. Windsor

 Diary of a Mad Law Professor

By Patricia J. Williams

This article appeared in the April 27, 2009 edition of The Nation.

April 8, 2009

 

Reuters Photos

Michelle Obama greets Queen Elizabeth during the G-20 summit.

In 1985, Deborah Gray White published her now-classic little book, Ar’n't I a Woman? This gem of historical research examines the archetypes by which slave women in the plantation South were confined–the brazen, sexualized Jezebel; the domineering, emasculating Sapphire; the dependable, selflessly neutered mammy; and the perpetually loveless, suicide-inclined, tragic mulatta. These tropes haunt black women still: from the adventures of Flavor Flav and Strom Thurmond to the depictions from Don Imus and the minstrelsy of Tyler Perry.

It’s not easy living on the receiving end of this unhappy iconicity. That’s why so many minority women are so smitten by the work that Michelle Obama performs, if at a purely symbolic level. She defies the boxes into which black (as well as many Latina, Asian and white) women have been caged; she expands the force field of feminism in ecumenical and unsettling ways. I appreciate that there are those who feel that Michelle Obama has been “mom-ified” by the media. But given the centuries during which black women have been relentlessly taxonomized as mammy rather than mom, many black and brown women find this phenomenon paradoxically, even sweetly transgressive.

 

In some ways it’s an echo of the cultural tension within the “women’s lib” movement of the 1960s and ’70s: relatively privileged white women wanted to be liberated into the workplace; relatively exhausted and exploited black women wanted to be liberated from it. It’s a tension that’s still recognizable to some degree, if only as parallel reactionary forces. If Hillary Clinton was dogged by accusations that she was too much the aggressive career woman, Michelle Obama is now besieged with criticism that she’s not nearly careerist enough.

I don’t wish to romanticize either the “pricelessness” of domesticity or the econometrics of the workplace. My point is this: what’s frequently missing from the discussion of black women is their role as loving mothers, beloved wives, valued partners, cherished daughters, cousins, relatives. Lord deliver us from the best of our few so-called role models: hard-working, hard-edged disciplinarians, the ultimate iron-willed church ladies. Where, for heaven’s sake, is a picture of black femininity (in particular, that of darker-skinned, nontragic femininity) that might signify beauty, chic, elegance, vulnerability, sophistication?

And so Michelle Obama represents a more comprehensive identity for all women, but particularly for black women. Even when she’s just holding court at the head of the White House dinner table, she is a “black woman” performing a “white lady” role–a picture that still causes cultural confusion and anxiety. But Obama is at no risk of being sidelined as perpetual hostess; hers is a well-rounded life, one of multiple roles and layered humanity. She is powerful yet approachable, highly educated yet colloquial, bare-armed but modest, playful but consummately civilized.

If we do not always appreciate this at home, consider how she reflects upon our collective image abroad–and I do not mean whether her wardrobe competes with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s. She projects a powerfully modern image to conservative constituencies around the globe, whether in the Muslim world; or in Israel, where ultra-Orthodox newspapers recently airbrushed out all the women from a photo of Netanyahu’s new cabinet; or in China, where male children are so fetishized that each year thousands of boys are kidnapped and sold.

Then there’s Michelle Obama’s physical embrace of the queen of England. It may be hard for Americans to fully understand the symbolic significance of that encounter, to comprehend the extent to which traditional class hierarchies are reinforced throughout the United Kingdom by a thousand little rituals of deference and yearning. Here’s an example: for many years, an elderly British friend would send me a very nice plum pudding, always purchased from the high-end London grocer Fortnum & Mason. I didn’t realize the entire significance of the gesture until another British friend told me that this was the very gift the queen sent to favored subjects. One year, my Christmas pudding suddenly came from Tesco–the Piggly Wiggly of the United Kingdom. Whatever had I done to fall in my friend’s esteem?

It turns out that this was after Princess Diana had been killed. The queen had been roundly criticized for being out of touch with the common people, so the palace tried to reach out to her staff by sending plum pudding from Tesco. My dear friend, a true and loyal subject, had followed suit.

This raises a further question: why did the queen feel the need for such downscaling in the wake of Diana’s death? “The princess touched people,” friends told me, meaning that she literally used her hands to touch people, hugging AIDS victims and pulling starving Nigerian babies onto her lap. Royals “don’t do” that, and Diana was adored for her willingness to break this taboo.

The queen is old school, however. So when Michelle Obama casually put her arm around the royal shoulders, the act risked being the order of misfortune that ensued when George W. Bush massaged Angela Merkel’s neck. Instead, the palace quickly issued an uncharacteristically warm pronouncement that no protocol had been breached. What was truly remarkable, however, was that the queen, for the first time in her public career, had reached out her frail, white-gloved, little-old-lady hand, the one heretofore used only for waving, and encircled Michelle Obama’s waist. For many throughout the British Commonwealth, particularly in South Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, this was a mime of egalitarianism, an unexpected kabuki theater of respect and mutual regard. Michelle Obama had somehow pulled off a superlatively graceful transgression–a symbolically charged moment of the kind that quietly turns a bit of the old world upside down, yet leaves us smiling at the new world glimpsed beyond.

Counselor-In-Chief

Chief Counsel

Why Michelle left the firm.

By Patricia J. Williams

New York Magazine

Published Mar 18, 2009

Recently, U.S. News and World Report ran a poll asking readers to whom they would entrust their child if she were running a day-care center: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi, or Michelle Obama. It was a low point in the use of the subjunctive, as witless and transparently sexist as wondering who could Sheetrock a wall better, Howard Dean or Rod Blagojevich.

Personally, I’d rather spend time thinking about which of them I’d want to represent me if I had to sue a day care, or whom I’d want to see entrusted with regulatory oversight of the peanut butter my child ingests.

 

Michelle Obama would be my top choice in any such poll. Without disparaging the other women, Mrs. Obama represents a new generation of feminist accomplishment: freed from the anxiety to do everything at once or be all things to all people.

 

She was of course not just a lawyer but her husband’s assigned mentor when he arrived at her firm, fresh out of school. I’m a lawyer too, and I remember well the days when it was inconceivable that a woman might mentor a man. I’m a product of my generation, I suppose, slightly younger than Hillary Clinton, a decade older than Michelle Obama. The early years of my career were characterized by the kinds of sorry, time-consuming battles we’ve almost forgotten: Should a female attorney have to wear trousers to court in order to look more “like a lawyer?” Or must she wear a skirt in order to look more “like a lady?” And, of course, every professional woman of my age has a bathroom story: If they label the men’s room “unisex” after the first woman is hired at the firm, is that the equality we were looking for? Hillary Clinton’s edgy, hypercompetent self-presentation resonates as a product of that era.

 

Michelle Obama didn’t have to fight quite as many of those purely physical blockades. For one thing, unlike in my day, she had female role models in law school–like the extraordinary human rights scholar, Martha Minow. When she graduated and took a position in the marketing and antitrust department of Sidley Austin, she was mentored by Professor Minow’s father, the legendary former FCC chairman, Newt Minow.

 

Of course, helping to represent big companies like AT&T (in a hostile takeover) and Union Carbide (in an antitrust matter) didn’t ultimately satisfy, and Michelle left after three years to work for the mayor of Chicago. The culture of law firms was (and remains) ruthless: She would have had to fight like mad to prove her intellect at every turn; she would have had to steel herself against the accusations that her presence in elite circles was the product of “lowered standards.” But one doesn’t get the sense that she shrank from the fight–just that she chose a different one.

 

She wanted, she said during her speech at the Denver convention, to be able to tell her children that “we committed ourselves to building the world as it should be.”

 

 

Eight Is Enough

Diary of a Mad Law Professor

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.

February 11, 2009

 

AP Images
Whittier resident Ulyses Guzman holds a sign outside the home of the Suleman family in Whittier, Calif. on Friday, Feb. 6, 2009

For some years now, the biotechnology of fertility enhancement has been exalted as God’s gift to the biblically barren. A relentless narrative of entitlement intertwined with prayerfulness has framed infertility as a tragedy, an oppression, an agony, a disease. Some have proclaimed a “right” to a “natural,” biologically related child, a child “like me.” Unusually large Middle American families–some with up to eighteen children–are offered movie deals and television programs.

 

Against the backdrop of a cold, impersonal and lonely world, these well-feathered and overly populated nests look villagey and warm. It’s an undeniably seductive vision, even if other options like adoption and fostering are almost never mentioned. Also less discussed are the side effects of this mad race for biological generation at all costs: the likelihood of multiple births, low birth weight and birth defects; the ethics of using poorer women as fetal hatcheries; the health risks to young women who have their “Ivy League” eggs extracted for handsome sums of cash. 

There are loads of good reasons to think about regulating these medical procedures; we should have come up with something other than a “free market” for them years ago. But now, with the birth of Nadya Suleman’s octuplets in Bellflower, California, we are confronting a perfect storm of eugenic outcry. With a plunging economy, all the well-rehearsed elements of the “undeserving” welfare queen are lined up: Suleman is single, disabled, unemployed, on food stamps and has six other children under the age of 8, one of whom is reportedly autistic. She lives in a matchbox-size house with her resentful parents, who think she’s insane. Toss in that funny, foreign-sounding name–which turns out to be, gasp, Iraqi!–and the backlash is in full swing.

No doubt Suleman has emotional problems. But rather than caring about her mental health, much of the media are content to pillory her as a drain on the public dole–selfish, frivolous, calculating and cruel. No Brangelina-style accolades of “God Bless ‘Em” in People magazine. Just impassioned calls to cut off her remaining sources of income and to criminally prosecute the doctor who fertilized her. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even ran an op-ed calling for the government to appoint a legal advocate for every child born to an unmarried woman, since the “lack of a father’s guidance” must be “a major cause of [children's] suffering.” Furthermore, in the case of Suleman’s children, “the legal advocate would file suit against the fertility clinic or a physician who knowingly contributed to their abuse–life in a multiple-child household headed by a single woman.”

Nadya Suleman’s saga, in other words, has highlighted a deep cognitive dissonance about whether children are “assets” or eternal expenditure, divine joy or devilish curse in a time of dwindling planetary resources. When I first heard of Suleman, my immediate thought was of Andrea and Rusty Yates–married, fundamentalist Christian believers in that ubiquitous story line about going forth and multiplying no matter what. After caring for and home-schooling five very young children with no assistance but prayer, and with accumulating signs of postpartum psychosis, Andrea Yates woke up one morning and drowned all her children with quiet efficiency.

And so the specter of psychotic breakdown haunts me when I think of the Suleman abode: one autistic child, plus 2-year-old twins, plus four other kids ages 3 to 7, plus eight newborns ranging from one to three pounds, plus a grandfather who has gone back to Iraq to earn more money for the family, plus a grandmother furious at the medical professionals who “assisted” her daughter, plus a surreally chipper Nadya, who despite the miserable odds remains enrolled as a graduate student in, of all things, pediatric counseling. This situation is undeniably sheer madness, but the public discussion seems fixated on the question of whether she can “afford” so many kids, as though if she was rich, this would be sane.

This past fall The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Alex Kuczynski, fashion writer and self-confessed “cosmetic surgery addict.” Her wish to have a child was framed by fierce determinism, the “natural outgrowth” of marriage to her husband–without whom she “would skip the child.” Kuczynski is married to a man whose “sperm had a track record”–six other children by two prior wives. She, the third bride and twenty years her husband’s junior, described herself as engaged in nothing less than a “battle for my fertility”; having a biological child was “necessary,” a “mad desire,” a “compulsion” and “proof” of the marital bond, without which she faced “wrecked hopes” and an “abyss of grief.” Indeed, to die “without having created a life is to die two deaths: the death of yourself and the death of the immense opportunity that is a child.” When she thinks she’s pregnant, she feels a “shiver of victorious accomplishment…. my own fecundity triumphant.” When she tells people she’s not, she feels “barren, decrepit, desexualized,” “branded with a scarlet ‘I’ for ‘Infertile,’” “the dried-up crone with a uterus full of twigs.”

Just because Kuczynski is married and wealthy does not make her less obsessive or more profound than Suleman. Kuczynski sounds like a sad, silly child mooning over “fertile but fit” stars like Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek and “John Edwards’s sometime mistress,” who all had babies in their 40s. Likewise, Suleman takes heart looking at Angelina Jolie. Suleman and Kuczynski represent disturbing emotional extremes. But that should not excuse the rest of us from examining the oppressive competitive natality that seems to have gripped us–the fantasies of “baby bumps” and breeding, always breeding, yet more of “our kind.” Our culture’s antifeminist backlash and its unrealistic aspirations have bewitched Kuczynski and Suleman, these two young women who are so addled and so suggestible, so endowed and yet so impoverished. All these years after the age of “liberation,” perhaps it is time to revisit the myths we still concoct about childless women’s worth.

• Copyright © 2008 The Nation