Patricia Williams

Patricia Williams, "Gilded Lilies and Liberal Guilt"

Patricia Williams (1951- ) was born in Boston, and earned a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1972 and a J.D. from Harvard University Law School in 1975. She's been a city attorney in Los Angeles, and has taught law at Golden Gate University, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Columbia University. She's written the books The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991), The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (1995), and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1998). Her work frequently appears in periodicals such as The Nation, Callaloo, the New York Times, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Gilded Lilies and Liberal Guilt," in which Williams uses a close look at her family history to ask some question about the relationship between politics and business, is an excerpt from The Alchemy of Race and Rights.

CONTENT

1. What document comes into the author's possession that involves her "great-great-grandmother"?
2. What does the word chattel mean?
3. Who is Austin Miller?
4. What happens to the author's great-great grandmother's children?
5. What ultimately happens to Williams's great-great grandmother?
6. Explain the title of this piece.

STRATEGY AND STYLE

1. Examine the imagery that starts in paragraph six and is repeated in paragraphs seven and eight. Describe the two images. What do they have to do with the author's view of the relationship between her great-great grandmother and Austin Miller?
2. Discuss this piece as a cause and effect essay. What major causes and what major effects does the author describe? How does she support her main points? Do any of the effects in turn become causes?
3. Take a look at the use of parentheses in paragraph three. What information is provided in parentheses? In whose voice? What's particularly effective about this usage given their role in that family?

1. What is the role of guilt in your life? Does it stem from your politics, or from somewhere else? How can you tie in your feelings in this regard to your reading?
2. How does "family legend" function in your life? Can you find anything similar in the important stories and accounts in your family to that which the author describes as important in hers?

SUGGESTIONS FOR SUSTAINED WRITING

1. List the four oppositions the author spells out at the beginning of paragraph six. Choose the one that interests you the most, and write an essay dealing with how this issue has changed over the time the author's great-great grandmother was alive to the present day.
2. In the first paragraph Williams speaks of "the intersection of commerce and the Constitution." What are some of the major links between business and American politics? Use your reading and your own observations, narrow this topic, and write an essay about this intersection.

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Try to trace your family tree back to one of your great-great grandmothers. Did you make it all the way back? If not, where did you get stuck? How might you be able to get over this? In any case what did you learn? How did it deepen your appreciation of this reading?

WEB CONNECTION

To pursue issues related to African American genealogy further, take a visit to this site that is devoted to the topic. There, you'll find all sorts of information and links to things like census records, cemetery transcriptions, and searchable databases.

LINKS

Biographical

Here's Williams's homepage from the Columbia Law School, where she's the James L. Dohr Professor. You'll find some biographical information there, as well as a photo.

This is her biography from the MacArthur Foundation, an institution from which she won a "genius grant" in 2000. How does the information you've found here differ from that found on the page above? Why, do you think, it's different?

Bibliographical

Ready for some more of Williams's work, this time in etext? Click here and you can read an excerpt from Seeing a Color-Blind Future. It's taken from chapter one, "The Emperor's New Clothes."

This page contains information about a piece Williams wrote called "The Underground Boy" for Callaloo. What would be the most efficient way for you to get your hands on the complete essay?

Cultural

Interested in writing about slavery in the U.S.? This chronology of U.S. statutes concerning the topic is a useful research tool from the Yale Law School.

If you'd like to put Williams's work into a broader political context, here is a very good general article about the Civil Rights Movement. It features multimedia links and will help get you started on your research.

An interesting way to see the scope of Williams's work is to browse through the list of her citations at the Library of Congress. What did you find there that you didn't know before your visit?