An Electronic Journal Published by The Law and Courts Section,
The American Political Science Association
Vol. 6, No. 4 (April, 1996) pp. 68-70
Herbert Jacob, Editor, Department of Political Science
Northwestern University, Evanston, Il. 60208 E-mail:
mzltov@nwu.edu
THE ROOSTER'S EGG: ON THE PERSISTENCE OF PREJUDICE by Patricia
J. Williams.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 262 pp. Cloth
$22.00
Reviewed by Keith J. Bybee, Department of Government, Harvard
University
The latest book by Patricia Williams has two striking
features. The first is its breadth. In the course of thirteen
short chapters, Williams takes a brisk tour of contemporary
American politics and culture. She examines political figures
ranging from Dan Quayle to Lani Guinier; television personalities
from Oprah Winfrey to Rush Limbaugh; and political trends from
the demonization of welfare mothers to the discovery of the angry
white male. And, if this were not enough, Williams complements
her analysis with a host of her own personal experiences, drawing
on her conversations with friends, her trips to the local
five-and-dime, and her recent experience with adoption. Beyond
its eclecticism, Williams's book is also striking because of its
sheer readability. Unlike many law professors who have abandoned
academic convention for the sake of presenting narratives,
Williams writes with engaging style. She knows how to turn a
phrase and how to tell a good story -- two talents which permit
her to produce enviably fluid prose.
Unfortunately, the broad scope of Williams's work,
coupled with her remarkable eloquence, present the reviewer with
a challenge. Williams weaves her topics together in a virtually
seamless manner, moving easily from Barbie dolls to the
racialization of crime to the cover illustrations of THE NEW
YORKER. Williams rarely pauses to formulate conclusions, draw
morals, or make synthetic assessments. Her book does not march
in a straight line from proposition to proposition. Indeed,
Williams offers neither an introduction nor a conclusion;
instead, her chapters circle on a shared plane, continually
revisiting the same questions and themes.
Thus, perhaps the best way to approach Williams's protean
book is to describe the themes which emerge from the text as a
whole. Williams's main concern is that "[d]espite the enormous
social, political, and legal fluctuations of twentieth-century
American life, there has been a remarkable stasis in race
relations [and] an intractability of gender hierarchy..."(16).
Williams counters entrenched prejudice by providing statistics on
the socioeconomic position of racial minorities and women.
Yet her reliance on such information is largely intermittent.
According to Williams, the basic problem is that prejudice has
prevailed at the rhetorical level of myth and metaphor. While
most people on welfare are white, for example, the perception
remains that a vast army of black single mothers are milking the
system for more than they deserve. "This powerful ideological
myth," Williams writes, "has somehow trumped every bit of
empirical reality even in the minds of well-educated
policymakers" (175).
The language and imagery of political discourse has been
contorted, generating rhetorical frameworks in which realities of
racial and gender discrimination become either natural or
invisible. Prejudice persists because Americans have adopted
ways of speaking and thinking which simply assimilate
discrimination out of existence
Page 69 follows:.
Williams discusses literally dozens of instances in which
the terms of public debate have been subtly skewed or implicitly
loaded, rendering the very claim of discrimination problematic.
For example, Williams notes that there "is a popular insistence
that the solution to the struggle over campus multiculturalism is
to just talk about it, one-on-one, without institutional sanction
or interference. Free speech as free enterprise zone. But this
solution makes only certain students -- those who are most
frequently the objects of harassment -- the perpetual teachers,
not merely of their histories, but of their very right to be
students. This is an immense burden, a mountainous presumption of
noninclusion that must be constantly addressed and overcome. It
keeps them eternally defensive and reactive" (39). Similarly,
when assessing recent court rulings on affirmative action,
Williams argues it is distressing "to observe the extent to which
both liberals and conservatives seem to rely on a conception of
affirmative action as favoritism.... [A]ntidiscrimination and
diversity are polarized, so that it is no longer possible to
recognize diversity without its being -- not merely risking being
-- discriminatory.... The focused and meaningful inquiry of
strict scrutiny has become a needle's eye through which minority
interests are too inherently suspect to pass. Racial and ethnic
identification as that against which one ought not to
discriminate has been twisted; now those very same racial and
ethnic categories are what discriminate" (106-7).
In the face of such public discourse, Williams repeatedly
calls for the initiation of serious conversations about
difference -- conversations which move beyond the extremes of
denial and accusation in order to address the concrete histories
of individuals and groups. Williams refers to the dialogical
recognition of connection and difference as "fluid hybridity"
(189). Under this view, society looks less like a collection of
self-contained atoms and more like a shifting mass of soap
bubbles: "although we can be grouped according to our
similarities, difference and similarity are not exclusive
categories, but instead are continually evolving. Equal
opportunity is not only about assuming the circumstances of
hypothetically indistinguishable individuals, but also about
accommodating the living, shifting fortunes those who are very
differently situated" (86).
Williams hopes that such conversations will undermine the
rhetorical abstraction and cultural amnesia that have helped
prejudice persist. Williams carefully avoids linking her hope to
a storybook picture of social harmony. She explicitly dismisses
"resolutions based innocently assimilative, dehistoricized
ideals" (191) as efforts which may simply reproduce existing
problems. Instead, Williams emphasizes "the possibility that
simple cantankerous coexistence may be what we should be aiming
for in a democracy based on live-and-let-live" (192). Talking to
one another in the right way ameliorates social ills without
miraculously curing them.
On the whole, then, what can be made of Williams's work?
At times her assessment of metaphor and discourse is a bit
strained. She occasionally supports a weighty meditation on
rhetorical meaning with nothing more that a snatch of
conversation caught while channel surfing daytime TV.
Nonetheless, Williams generally approaches the terms of public
discussion with great care and intelligence. Her insights into
the varied notions of identity, difference, and value embedded
within a range of contemporary debates are truly first rate.
Page 70 follows:
Her appeal to conversation as a response to persisting
prejudice is more problematic -- and interestingly enough it is
Williams herself that points this out. For all her efforts to
rework the terms public discussion, Williams often acknowledges
that such reworking is not enough. She argues that our reigning
metaphors and myths are not simply reflected in mass media;
instead, the media actively selects and reinforces specific
tropes, promoting certain voices while others are quietly read
into the background. As Williams writes, "The infinite
convertibility of terms is, I suppose, what makes the commerce of
American rhetoric so very fascinating. But these linguistic
flip-flops disguise an immense stasis of power and derail the
will to undo it" (107). In a context of collectively enforced
conceptions, individual efforts might well founder. "Every
generation has to go through a purging of language, an invention
of meaning in order to exist. Renaming as fair turnaround;
renaming as recapture from the stereotypes of others. Yet...
somehow... it seems I am running out of words these days.... The
moment I find some symbol of my presence in the rarefied halls of
elite institutions, it gets stolen, co-opted, filled with
negative meaning" (27).
Williams's loss of words seems odd in a book appealing to
conversation.
More broadly, her wordlessness raises complex questions about the
relationship between social structure and individual agency. Who
is it that steals and co-opts Williams's own words? How do the
various organs of the press coordinate into a single coercive
force? Is active coordination even required? If our collective,
cultural imagination operates at "a million nuanced levels"
(101), how can individuals ever conduct a conversation fully
recognizing each speaker in her own particularity? How can our
individual notions of similarity and difference remain fluid in
the face of structural pressure to the contrary?
In response to such questions, Williams can (and does)
offer her personal experiences negotiating the jagged boundaries
between individual creativity, group history, and cultural
assimilation. Her reflections provide a provocative beginning.
Yet, while an account of her participation in a hip-hop dance
class filled with Japanese students tell us something about
"fluid hybridity," it remains a step removed from the
complexities of the concrete conversations she advocates.
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Previously published reviews may be obtained at the Law &
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