Alchemy of Race and Rights Author:Patricia J. Williams Patricia Williams, a lawyer, brilliantly uses the tools of legal and literary theory to set out her views of current events and contemporary popular culture, from Civil Rights to Oprah Winfrey. She also traces the workings of 'ordinary racism' - everyday occurrences, casual, unintended, banal perhaps, but devastating. Using alchemy as her metaph... more »or and the law as mythological text, she shows us how the discourses of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, sanity and insanity, wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries. In deliberately transgressing such boundaries herself, she pursues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately, transformative. Patricia Williams herself is the great-great granddaughter of a slave and a white southern American lawyer. In this extraordinary autobiographical work, she eloquently and passionately reflects on the intersection of race, gender and class, showing us a positive way forward in unthinking the processes that allow racism to persist.« less