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.

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.

On The Coattails of History….

 

 

Tripping on Obama’s Coattails

by Patricia J. Williams

January 9, 2009 | 6:11am

 

Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

If the nation’s first female Solicitor General breaks a 139-year-old tradition and doesn’t wear a morning coat, can she still do her job with style?

Of the details one misses with no television coverage of the Supreme Court, surely the quaintest is that the Solicitor General of the United States must wear tails—more formally known as a morning coat—when arguing the government’s cases. Barack Obama’s new nominee for that position is Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan. If confirmed, she will be the first woman ever to hold that position, and as such her very presence triggers an epiphenomenal fashion crisis that shakes American socio-legal tradition to its very roots.

Perhaps I overstate. The tradition of the morning coat began in 1870, when the Office of Solicitor General was founded. Of course, back then it was more or less the equivalent of what a Brooks Brothers three-piece suit might be today—elegant but not archaic. Today we associate the morning coat with arch-formality, like weddings, state funerals or an afternoon at Ascot or Henley. But in its heyday, the morning coat was a less formal version of the frock coat, literally suitable for morning rather than evening affairs. Also known as a “cutaway,” the hemline commences at the waistline in front, then curves downward into two long tails in the back—thus making it suitable for horseback riding.

The persistence of this sartorial custom beyond its natural lifespan—and in the American justice system of all places—is not merely a quirk of history but testament to the deep and tenaciously clubbish culture that still afflicts the highest levels and most intransigently closed circles of power. Tradition, yes, but it’s also the mark of a male-dominated legal profession still struggling to deal with the radical transformations of the last thirty years, during which women’s numbers skyrocketed from the low single digits to approximately fifty percent of law school graduates.

From the perspective of world hunger, it’s a small matter I suppose, the peculiar sartorial habits of solicitors general. Yet structurally, it’s problematic. There’s The Uniform for those whose endowments conform to high Victorian tradition; and then there is “something else” for those girlish “others” who’ll just have to figure out a way to assimilate, accommodate, or “pass.” No, it’s not as insidious an affliction of gender apartheid as separate tee times for women in the PGA or the lack of women’s bathrooms in the executive suite. But still the question presents: what’s a gentle-mistress to do when required to accessorize according to a long line of Mr. Darcy look-alikes? The cane or the whip? Balmorals or button-up boots? Bowler or bonnet? Silk stockings cum satin snood? Crinoline or calico? Seriously now—taffeta or twill?

There is not a good deal of reassuring precedent when dealing with such dilemma. Barbara Underwood, a well-regarded public advocate, served as Acting Solicitor General for six months in 2001; and there are numbers of female assistant or deputy solicitors who have also argued before the court. Though it is not easy to find records of what any of them might have worn, there are a few legendary, perhaps apocryphal, struggles commonly shared among lawyers. My favorite is said to have occurred during the Clinton administration, when a female deputy from the Solicitor General’s office wore what is variously described as a “dove-brown” or “doe-beige” business suit while arguing a case to the Supreme Court.

According to a friend who, to this day, fears being identified, Chief Justice Rehnquist “went berserk.” He chastised her for inappropriate attire, and followed it up with a scathing letter to the Solicitor General himself, requesting that this not occur again. Brown textiles! The scandal! (Yes, this is the same Justice Rehnquist whose love of costume led him to affix to his judicial robes a set of gold stripes he once saw adorning the fictional persona of Lord Chancellor in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe.) In response, the Solicitor General’s office thenceforth recommended that women wear what is popularly known as a “feminized” version of morning attire, and/or a plain black suit. (In case you’re wondering, a feminized morning suit is more or less like the men’s version, only with darts at the bust line: that is, a dark jacket, often with silk trim on the lapels and those perky Scrooge McDuck tails flapping out behind. And instead of the classic striped charcoal trousers, a neo-classical striped charcoal skirt. Open question whether the same requires a Windsor-knotted tie with starched winged collar.)

In her lovely meditation, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that Thackeray’s “affectation of the style, with its imitation of the eighteenth century, hampers one…” She thinks about looking at his manuscript to see “whether the alterations were for the benefit of the style or of the sense. But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning….” Here her reflection is interrupted: “…like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back, that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction…”

What is style? What is meaning? Are the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States really unable to concentrate on the law of the land when female advocates wear timid-deer, bird-brown frocks rather than manly-tailored frock coats? Are they really better able to engage with serious issues when twenty-first century men must gussy themselves up like nineteenth century dandies in order to be heard? What does equality mean if the most iconic advocates in our justice system comport themselves according to nineteenth century models of male virtue? And if it’s tradition we love so much, should not the female alternative to the morning coat be that of a ruche-trimmed mini top hat with ostrich feathers and tulle silk veil; a puff-sleeved blouson over laced corset; tantalizingly ankle-grazing skirt made yet more tantalizing by a large bustle stuffed with sacks of horsehair suspended by a series of latches, collapsible armatures and springs for ease of sitting and standing?

Somehow, I feel confident that Elena Kagan’s alterations will be “for the benefit…of the sense.”

Patricia J. Williams has been published widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster’s Egg; and Seeing a ColorBlind Future: The Paradox of Race. She is a also a columnist for The Nation.

 

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-09/tripping-on-obamas-coattails/p/

Copyright 2008 The Daily Beast

Facing The Future

Series: 2008 in review

Facing the future

Key questions for 2009

After a year dominated by the global credit crisis, the election of a new president in the US and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Observer writers look ahead to the issues that are likely to dominate headlines next year

• The Observer, Sunday 28 December 2008

In one of his more intriguing koans, George Bush, when asked about his legacy, responded: “In history we’ll all be dead.” As 20 January, Inauguration Day, approaches, all I can think is: “L’histoire est morte. Vive l’histoire!”

To me, the election of Barack Obama feels like a new lease on life. Of course, I don’t underestimate the challenges that his administration will face in this war-torn, financially distressed, globally overheated moment. But perhaps it’s because we’ve hurtled so far downward in recent years that I am optimistic: frankly it is much, much too easy to imagine an alternative universe, a veritable slough of despond. We Americans came very close to electing John McCain and Sarah Palin. Imagine this interregnum if McCain were filling his cabinet with insiders from the Bush White House. Imagine what Sarah Palin’s budget for clothes might be, just for the swearing-in ceremony alone. And imagine the savoury distractions: Last week, for one juicy if unfair example, Palin’s pregnant daughter’s fiancé’s mother (or “Palin’s daughter’s baby daddy’s mama” as the tabloids gleefully dubbed her) was arrested on drug trafficking charges.

Really – how could one not be panting with relief and a sense of promise just now? As the Palin family soap opera continued to unfold, Obama was busy rounding out his cabinet with the nomination of Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy. Chu is a physicist and Nobel laureate whose work centres on green energy alternatives. An actual climatologist! O joy and hallelujah!

President-elect Barack Obama (Lord, I love the feel of that on the tongue) really does represent a profound change of thought and direction for the US. Whether he can accomplish all that some of us hope remains to be seen, but the very fact of the change is sustaining. He’s intelligent, well-informed and thoughtful; for the most part, he has surrounded himself with the same. He’s also an unparalleled source of inspiration, giving the term “role model” whole new vigour. A young friend tells me that the Barack Obama action figure is selling like hotcakes, literally leaping off the shelves, something few black action figures have ever done before. “It’s got moveable joints,” exults my friend. “And it points!” Towards the future, I’d warrant. Yes, we’ll have to see just how far symbolism can get us, but in Obama’s case it’s already farther than one might have had reason to expect.

So here’s my New Year’s shout-out to us all: Season’s greetings, global friend!/The Great Mistake is at an end./Whatever gloom may yet portend,/ Just think what Heaven did forfend.

Patricia J Williams
Professor of Law at Columbia University

The Theater of Political Appearance

October 15, 2008

The Politics of Michelle Obama’s Hair

by Patricia J. Williams

Sometimes there’s a difference between beauty and beauty queen. And last night, on The Daily Show, Michelle Obama emerged to show us just where that line might be. Unfailingly generous in her assessments of the McCains and the Palins, she was graceful even when pressed by Jon Stewart about what would happen if Barack Obama were to win the presidency, “but you lose to Cindy McCain.” She laughed warmly: “We don’t want that to happen.”

Stewart was getting at something crucial. There has been a kind of sub rosa contest in the media depiction of our potential first ladies that always seems to pit surface versus substance. “We become part of the filler” Michelle observed wryly.

But Michelle Obama may be the first politically visible American woman to have actually combined surface and substance into one package. And what I love about her is that she looks so unencumbered by it all. It is not that she diminishes the sacrifices it took to deliver her to this threshold; it’s that she seems genuinely relaxed and happy in her role as lawyer, businesswoman, wife and mother.

Click to view the video.

She seems unbothered by hair hang-ups, make-up issues, clothing crises. She always seems minimally but perfectly made up; she isn’t afraid to wear flats; she lends a certain class to the most inexpensive of outfits. And even her hair—usually such a politically fraught subject for women of color! Between the Scylla of Condoleezza Rice’s good-little-girl page-boy, and the Charybdis of Angela Davis’s 1960′s Afro, Michelle Obama’s looser style provides a breezy, refreshing kind of Golden Mean.

Between the Scylla of Condoleezza Rice’s good-little-girl page-boy, and the Charybdis of Angela Davis’s 1960′s Afro, Michelle Obama’s looser style provides a breezy, refreshing kind of Golden Mean.

Her optimistically upturned flip reflects an attitude that’s subtly but powerfully liberating. When I graduated from law school in the mid-1970s, African-American women’s hair was constantly being scrutinized for signs of subversion: the more “natural,” the more dangerous. So we pressed our hair flat with the weight of other people’s expectations and waited for times to change.

While curly hair, twists, short Afros, and corn rows are all much more prevalent and tolerated these days, those choices are still publicly interrogated to an unseemly degree. Lani Guinier, Bill Clinton’s nominee to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department, was deemed radical in part because of what some commentators called her “strange hair.” Similarly, when Rep. Cynthia McKinney changed her hairstyle to corn rows, Capitol security guards blocked her way, claiming they didn’t recognize her as a member of Congress.

Most recently, in the most discussed New Yorker magazine cover ever, what stood out for me was that Michelle Obama’s putative politics were satirized via…an Afro! Angela Davis hair. Yes, friends, the hairdo that crossword puzzle enthusiasts find regularly described as a four-letter synonym for the fashion sensibility of protesters, armed revolutionaries, and frat boys yukking it up in “fright wigs.” We’re talking unequivocally, implacably, no bones about it, political hair. Regardless of how differently the real Davis may wear her hair today, her coif is remembered as a mathematically precise series of explosions, of radioactive microwaves pulsing outward from the sun of the universalized angry black scalp.

I don’t believe that we are anywhere near a “post-race” or a “post-feminist” moment, but I do think that Michelle Obama models a kind of post-“thank-God-A’mighty-free-at-last,” post-Condi, post-Hillary, and definitely post-assimilationist aesthetic. Looking good, but thinking about more important things.

That’s new in the public sphere. Political wives are so uniformly stiff and long-suffering that I always feel terribly sorry for them, so erect and beady-eyed with the glaze of patient insincerity, tricked out in Chanel suits and chunky gold jewelry, seated on the dais behind their husbands, ankles crossed demurely.

Political wives, if you haven’t noticed, are almost always white, and not just because there are relatively few black politicians. Black political wives reflect the degree to which African-Americans are politically liberal but overwhelmingly socially conservative: so traditionally stay-at-home that they’re doomed to invisibility. I mean, how often do you see Jesse Jackson’s wife? Did you even know that Al Sharpton is married?

Iconic black female faces in public life are few and far between, and they’re usually not married. They’re widowed, like Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz; or they’re single and childless, like Condoleezza Rice. It’s hard to be seen as a trophy wife, or a beauty queen, when you’re simultaneously figured as strong as an ox, epically tragic, and pious enough to curdle the promiscuous streak that supposedly runs hot in the blood of “your kind.”

Sometime during the 2004 presidential election season, a friend gave me a startlingly lifelike Halloween mask of Rice. Truth be told, I didn’t have to reach far for the rest of the costume. I just threw on one of the obligatory little business suits with which my closet bulges, and which mark me—and her—as hardworking, obedient, thoroughly buffed and totally no-nonsense. Add pumps, pearls, et voilà!

At first it was great fun wearing the mask to parties, with its enormous bobbling head and the serious set of its primly pressed plastic lips. But after a while it felt sad. Despite the fact that our politics could not be further apart, there was enough of myself tied up in the public image of Rice that my impersonation ultimately became the personification of my own anxiety about identity. Like me, she was raised to “style” racial redemption by studying so hard in so many disciplines that no one could ever, ever challenge whether she was “intelligent enough” or “well-qualified.” See her do a double axel in ice skates! Hear her play extremely difficult passages of Brahms! Good Lord, she speaks Russian! She’s safely asexual! She’s miraculous!

Her parents resembled mine, who in turn resembled a whole generation of zealously ambitious black parents who spent much of the 20th century suing for access to better education. Like Rice, my credibility has always been dependent on modeling the most amazing departure from a welfare queen that anyone has ever met.

In contrast to these images of dutiful severity, Michelle Obama is of a somewhat different generation; she embodies something I find both dignified and quite liberating. A big part of it is seeing a highly educated, professionally accomplished black woman center stage who is smiling and sure of herself and who is also loved—who’s in a good, happy relationship with a real hero of a husband.

A few weeks ago, the same friend who gave me the Condoleezza Rice mask presented me with a beautiful, hand-crafted papier-mâché Michelle Obama mask. The expression is radiant, sparkling, alive. One eyebrow is slightly raised and it has a mischievous little smile. My mood grows calmer and happier when I put it on. I don’t just want to wear it to parties; I want to walk down the street in it, as though announcing, “Here is a whole new side of me.” With that mask on, I fluff the ends of my hair into a structured but insouciant flip. I dig out strings of beads so impertinently large that they could never have been spat from the mere entrails of an oyster.

There is something about this exercise that makes me feel very young again, dressing up in my mother’s high heels, practicing for transformations to come. Of course, this isn’t literally about Obama’s hair or her clothes. It’s about something deeper. It’s inspirational to see her upbeat, off-hand elegance, so unsaddled by anxiety, so unmarked by the effort of conforming and erasure and overcoming. Her beauty seems to telegraph an inner radiance of well-honed intelligence and gentle self-assurance. It’s a look I’m working on.

COPYRIGHT © 2008 RTST, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

have pantsuit, will travel…

 

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

 

August 27, 2008

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Reuters Pictures 

 

“Sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits” is how Hillary Clinton put it. And with those simple words, the peculiar misery haunting a certain slice of my entire professional life flashed before my eyes.

First let me set the scene: I got to Denver late after getting up at four in the morning to catch the plane here. My hotel is, as it turns out, not actually in Denver, but in the next suburb over. This means I have to take a shuttle bus and light rail or else a $70 cab ride, while the driver tries to figure out which roads into town haven’t been blocked off. Once at the convention center, you still have to stand in line for an hour or so to get through perimeter security, and then you walk for miles and miles on the indoor-outdoor concrete surfaces with which all of Denver is seemingly paved. 

What I mean is, that if you’ve worn the wrong shoes you don’t just pop back to your room to change. And if you’ve worn long pants and a snappy little power jacket with a silk lining that is slicked to your skin in the blistering heat, you don’t dare take it off, because you’re middle-aged and a little worried about bra straps.

So this is the kind of stuff rattling through my brain when Hillary Clinton spoke those fateful words. I looked at her well-constructed peach pantsuit and the pantsuits of the thousands of her well-heeled contributors on the floor, and thought: the night before, Michele Obama had worn a simple, single-layer sheath dress, appropriate for this weather, and a pair of low-heeled shoes. Elegant, confident and literally cooler. This thought, this contrast, made me stop my busy blogging about unity and the future and women as astronauts. I unbuttoned my jacket, kicked off my shoes underneath the press table. Whew, I said to myself. Hillary Clinton and I are trapped in the clothes of our generation.

I suppose there’s nothing like an election to turn the mind to fashion statements. And now that the party is at least nominally united, allow me this digression upon the little-observed semiotics of what hell it has been for a woman of a certain age to dress for success. To some extent it’s not exclusively woman’s issue–the citizenry is often disposed to deciphering candidates’ positions on serious issues, ranging from the war to the economy, from the esoterica of what they wear. Cowboy-boot politics. Italian-twill twee. Plaid-shirt populism. Lapel-pin patriotism.

This season, however, we have been much consumed with the matter of shoulder-pad feminism, as it was so ungraciously dubbed by pundits. The very term made me cringe, harkening back as it does to my first days out of law school some thirty-odd years ago, when as a result of brand-new affirmative action policies, women entered professional life in something like numbers that mattered.

Its hard to remember how flummoxed everyone was at the prospect of women in boardrooms, women in courtrooms, women in…. power. Garden hats, tea dresses and little white gloves simply weren’t up to the task. And what a task it was. Pervasive skepticism at our presence in male geographies had to be countered with the trappings of authority, the semaphores of serious intent, the packaging of no-nonsense. Proving that we were as good as the guys thus ushered in an ugly and exaggerated anti-romanticism: no lace, no flounces, no ruffles, no pleats. No hankies, as though in expectation of copious tears. No loud colors that made you sparkle or shine. No lockets, no heart-shaped objects dangling from delicate silver threads. No heaving bosoms, no bursting bras–indeed, no obvious breasts. Just a uniformly square-cut suit in industrial tones, perhaps a robust rope of heavy gold for a wristwatch. We looked as though Charlotte Gilman’s housewife had stepped out of her yellow-wallpapered prison of sentimental virtue and bellied up to the bar.

So. The number-one thing that makes me wince when I look at old photos of myself is the Power Suit. The power suit was the de rigueur uniform for professional women during the 1980s. It had over-compensatory shoulder pads, whose width exceeded those of your average quarterback.

It is no accident that this was also the era of Big Hair–one absolutely had to have a helmet of expansively frazzled locks just to proportionalize those shoulders. “You looked like Mark Maguire,” says my son as he flips through the family album, then wisely adds, “but prettier.” His confusion is forgivable. In those days, women always looked steroidally bloated, pumped up to the point of near-explosion.

One of Wikipedia’s definitions of “power suit” is “a powered exoskeleton,” to wit, a machine covering the body to “assist and protect soldiers” or to “aid the survival of people in dangerous situations.” That captures exactly my experience in the realm of pin-striped grey and navy blue serge.

The second most despicable item of clothing from that era was the so-called Dressed for Success Bow at the Throat. This was a time, you must recall, when women and men still existed in very separate conceptual realms. In order to transgress the boundary between “women’s work” and “men’s work,” one of the most common recommendations was that women “pass” by trading in the pearls for a tie. Not for a manly-man’s tie, God forbid, but rather for a huge, flouncy, floppy, thoroughly “effeminate,” and not at all “feminist,” version of a bow tie. Said bow was always in red silk, like an Edwardian Christmas caroler, the better to go with the navy blue of the suit. It was like a bad gender-bending joke–us bravely-liberated big-haired shoulder-pad feminists yoked at the throat with the mark of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Does it come as any surprise that such an ensemble might require a crisply starched Peter Pan collar?

Let me pass on to the cruelty of shoes. Heel and toe. Power and pain. There is still no such thing as a women’s shoe that conveys comfort and signals power simultaneously. A serious power shoe must lend height. Height means the sadomasochistic punishment of, say, four-inch bootlets in butter-soft suede from Bloomingdales. Despite the hard-won graduate degrees qualifying one as a professional woman of immense rationality, one nevertheless may be seduced by the ability to stand eyeball-to-eyeball with any man who challenges your word. It is vanity that will ensure a nightmarish escarpment of physical regret. For many moons after taking them off–and assuredly by the time you turn 50–you will hobble about at a dangerously forward-pitched slant.

What makes work “back-breaking” for many professional women is not the traditional swinging of shovel and axe but the isometric bewilderment of balancing heavy hair, padded shoulders and overloaded tote-bag against the angled physics of stiletto heels.

And yet I confess: I love stilettos irrationally. They make me think of Andy Warhol’s lovely sketches back in the days when he was an illustrator for B. Altman and I. Miller. I associate them with his beautifully inked blotted-line pictures of ice cream cones and pink layer cakes. Stilettos are so feminine yet strong, professional yet sexy, dangerous but in control, cruel but competent. Such good lawyer garb. Such good weapons with which to crack glass ceilings.

Indeed, according to Jack Green’s discussion in his fascinating little volume, The Physics Factbook, a stiletto high heel exerts more than fifteen times the pressure exerted by an elephant’s foot:

Pressure is defined as force over area. Pressure is directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to area. This inverse relationship is an important concept when it concerns the immensity of pressure. The significance of the high heel comes into play because it has such a minute area. Due to this fact, the pressure under that high heel is extremely large. If one were to solve the aforementioned problem, the solution is deduced as follows:

This is approximately 40 atmospheric pressures.

 

If only all this rogue elephantine female power could have found its expression in an aggressively adorned tea hat or a ferociously iron-fisted velvet glove. Instead it had to be the shoe, so relentlessly jack-hammering its liberatory tattoo upwards, into the spine.

And there is no perfect antidote to such suffering. Yes, there’s always the frequent if furtive resort to snub-nosed, little-girl flats. Alice-in-Wonderland shoes. Ballerina slippers. Aerosoles with bouncy, innocent, rubber-ball bottoms. Such honest footgear may be gloriously, eye-rollingly more comfortable, but flats do diminish not matter how hard they try. They make you shorter to start with–even if “shorter” means “your actual height.” In this, Michele Obama, at nearly six feet, enjoys a distinct avantage. Flats make me, however, feel sedate as a nun, even when they come in leopard print.

Some of this is probably because I associate flat, round-toed shoes with the boring old blood-colored Oxfords and wool knee socks I had to wear from kindergarten through middle school. School shoes. Sensible shoes–back in the day when Twiggy was iconic, an alluringly un-sensible dandelion puff in a Peter Max miniskirt. Twiggy wore Cuban heels! and patent-leather go-go boots! My mother, the breeziest of upbeat matriarchs, dismissed my complaints summarily: “Lace them up. No ones going to remember your shoes a hundred years from now.”

How wrong she was. I would be a different, happier, more charitable human being if I had not had to wear those ugly red Oxfords with their unforgiving arch supports. Perhaps today I wouldnt be so easily smitten by shoes with not just elegant spindles for heels but sharply tapered triangles for toes. Power points. I’ve heard that some women actually have plastic surgery to shorten their toes so as be able to squeeze into a set of narrow-nosed Manolo Blahniks. The pathetic thing is, when I walk into a meeting wearing my kick-ass Jimmy Choos, I almost understand why. It’s worth the pain! My IQ, my courage, my logic are outstanding!

But still, I wish I’d never worn them.

After Hillary finished speaking, it took me two hours and forty-five minutes to get back to my hotel, polish my posting and file this. I walked miles hunting for a taxi but it was a zoo–a zoo with a shortage of cabs. I went back to the convention center, consulted a transportation guide, who directed me to take a forty-minute bus ride to the Red Lion Hotel and then get a cab from there. The Red Lion is where the Texas delegation is staying; so I rode with a lively group in gaudy cowboy hats sprinkled with red, white and blue glitter who kept eyeing me with friendly suspicion and asking: “You’re not from Texas, are you?” When I confessed that I was from New York, it was like one of those piquante sauce advertisements. “New York City!!” they said, and shook their heads.

I think it must have been my shoes.