Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race

Posted in Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science on 2010-08-26 04:25Z by Steven

Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of MacMillan)
April 1998
84 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-52533-0, ISBN10: 0-374-52533-1

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia Law School

In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where “color doesn’t matter”—where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the great divide between “the poles of other people’s imagination and the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides,” and discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving racism. Williams offers us a new starting point—“a sensible and sustained consideration”—from which we might begin to deal honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices.

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Not-Black by Default

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-05-25 02:16Z by Steven

Not-Black by Default

The Nation
Diary of a Mad Law Professor
2010-04-21

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia University

Most people who appear phenotypically “black” don’t play around when the government asks them to report their race.

Last week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote an insightful column, “Black by Choice,” about President Obama’s having checked the box marked “Black, African American or Negro” on his Census form. As she notes, despite the way his complex heritage both disrupts “standard definitions of blackness” and creates “a definitional crisis for whiteness,” in American culture “having a white parent has never meant becoming white” if one also has an African-descended parent…

Read the entire article here.

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