Law discussion paper 5 pages minim

Citation: 11 Women's Rts. L. Rep. 11 1989

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Response to Mari Matsuda 1988 Women of Color and the Law Conference at Yale University

PAT WILLIAMS*

I so loved Mari's paper. I particularly loved her use of the image of the first quail's call, the marker signifying the departure to freedom. I hadn't known that it was a signal during the days of the underground railroad; there is something quite haunting in that knowledge. As I read Mari's piece, it was the quail call that kept com- ing back to me-I kept thinking, how beautiful! how poetic!

After a while, however, I began to realize that the quail's call, in Mai's paper as in under- ground railroad days, was not the misty evocative symbol I was rhapsodizing about, but was a very particular thing: a real signal, a real sound. So I tried to remember what a quail's song sounds like. I'm not terribly familiar with birds, but if I recall correctly, a quail makes a sound that is quite loud and unattractive, that is alarming in fact. And I remarked on how that knowledge shifted my per- spective: if I were to spend all my time looking for the poetry and beauty of freedom's break, I might not recognize the alarming complicated sound of its actual moment.

Another thing that Mari's paper described so well was the phenomenon of multiple conscious- ness, multiple voice, double-voicedness-the shifting consciousness which is the daily experi- ence of people of color and of women. When I was younger, I used to associate that dreamy, many-sided feeling of the world with fears that I was schizophrenic. Now that I am older (and

postmodern) I think that there is much sanity in that world-view. If indeed we are mirrors of each other in this society, if I have a sense of self-con- cept that is in any way whatsoever dependent upon the regard of others, upon the looks that I sometimes get in other people's eyes as judgment of me-if these others indeed supply some part of my sense of myself, then it makes a certain amount of social sense to be in touch with, rather than unconscious of, that doubleness of myself, that me that stares back in the eyes of others.

Let me give you a more specific example of what I mean. I read Mari's paper late last night. When I read it I was in a bit of a depression be- cause of an experience that I had just a couple of days ago: I gave a talk at the University of West Virginia, in which I described the editing process of a law review article I once wrote, entitled "Spirit-Murdering the Messenger: The Law's Re- sponse to Racism."' That article begins with a story about how I was denied entry to a clothing boutique in Manhattan because of my race. In the first edits, all reference to my race was de- leted, so that the story made absolutely no sense. The editors told me that it was against editorial policy to allow people to describe their physiog- nomy. This application of neutral principles ac- ted in an ideological sense to replicate the experi- ence of people of color in this society: for if the edited version had meaning at all, it told a story not of discrimination, but of terrible paranoia; if,

*Visiting professor at Stanford Law School. 1. 42 U. of Miami L. Rev. 127 (1987).

[Women's Rights Law Reporter, blume 11, Number 1, Spring 1989] © 1989 by Women *s Rights Law Reporter, Rutgers-The State University

0085-8269/80/0908

moreover, the reader were to guess my race, she would have to do so by a presumptive process of gap-filling that resembles pre-judgment, and prej- udice. This story, I repeatedly told the West Vir- ginia audience, is why I unequivocally believe in the necessity of affirmative action, in practice and in principle.

Apparently, there was a reporter in the audi- ence, from the Dominion Post of Morgantown, West Virginia. The following day, the front page of the Metro section of that paper ran a story that began with the following:. "Affirmative action promotes prejudice by denying the status of wo- men and blacks, instead of affirming them as its name suggests. So said New York City attorney Patricia Williams to an audience Wednes- day ....

I was stunned and I was depressed-not only because it was a lie, but because it made me sound so stupid. Not only did it make me sound stupid, it made me sound like the Reagan-Bush adminis- tration. Specifically, it made me sound like the more rabid, inane members of the Civil Rights Commission-you know who they are. And as I read the words that had been put in my mouth, I realized that there were two of me at work here. There was one in the newspaper, that was mas- querading, running around saying things I didn't believe in. And then there was the me you see before you today, alternating between indignation and defeat, outraged and sputtering the herme- neutics of suspicion-hardly a single voice even now, but knowing at least what I don't believe in. And I was terrified by that feeling; I felt so split, so schizophrenic in the face of this force-fed neu- tralization of my words, this ideology of neutral- ity-gone-wild in the service of bias.

That's the backdrop against which I read Mari's paper last night. In reading it, I felt much better, much stronger. Her words were gentle and powerful and validating. And when I fin- ished reading, I went to bed and slept soundly. While I slept I had the following dream:

I was at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I was walking down a street full of revellers; on the other side of the street, I saw a tall black man who was walking toward me. He wore a crushed velvet purple hat and a crushed velvet purple cape and a black shirt and pants studded with silver

WOMEN'S RIGHTS LAW REPORTER [Vol. 11:11 (1989)]

and maybe some rhinestones. His name was Clarence Blackman, and he was the suppressed black soul of the Republican Party. Because sup- pressed, he seemed a little dangerous to me, a hard-drinking, free-wheeling, trickstering, un- trustworthy, transformative Mardi Gras spirit, probably a magician.

There was music on the street, and people started to dance. I started some steps of my own, full of lightness and grace and invention. Two white people immediately came to my side, news- paper editors, dance critics, guardians of neutral forms of dance expression. Each grabbed one of my arms and started to dance with me. At first I was flattered. I taught them some simple steps and they tried to dance with me; we tripped over one another clumsily and laughingly. At some point in the dream, I realized that they were steer- ing me into the middle of the street. Then I looked up and saw that Clarence Blackman had also been dancing, a very different but also a skilled dance, an African Indian male rhythmic dance, a complicated earth folk samba. I saw that two more dance critics had grabbed his arms too, and had guided him to the middle of the street and that now the two of us blacks had been faced off. The whole street was standing around en- joying the show. Both Clarence Blackman and I stopped dancing at once. Our dances were not the same dance, nor even complementary. They were ritual dances, not to be danced simultane- ously. We knew we had been force-paired be- cause we were both black, and we knew that the dance critics knew so little about dancing that they couldn't see the differences between us. Worst of all, we knew that the critics hadn't re- ally been asking us to teach them our dances in good faith; they didn't want to learn how to dance, they just wanted to be part of the show which we were.

And Clarence Blackman and I stood there in the middle of the street, somehow angry at each other, feeling humiliated, tricked, co-opted. They had made mirrors of us who had little in com- mon. We were pushed to center stage only to be neutralized. We were similarly grieved, but we had no comfort to share with one another. We had the pride of our separate dance heritage, and while neither of us understood the other's art

2. Matesa, "Attorney says affirmative action denies racism, sexism," The Dominion Post, April 8, 1988, p. BI, col. 1-2.

Williams/RESPONSE TO MATSUDA

form, we at least understood it as a separate art form, and we had no one with whom to share the depth or specificity of our loss. We were trapped and exiled from each other and from our audience in this complicated circumstance. And just before I woke up, Clarence Blackman turned away from me. I realized that he was going to

cry, perhaps for the first time since childhood. I woke up to the ugly, jagged sound, the alarming, unexpected sound, of sobs in his throat. And as I woke up, I noticed that on the back of Clarence Blackman's trembling, crushed velvet purple cape, there hung a long, elegant cascade of quail feathers.

Merideth McUregor, Impact Visuals

Women marching behind "Women of Color" banner in Washington, D.C., April 1989