Terminus 

A seemingly limitless amount of scholarship has been produced throughout the history of critical theory – particularly, for example, in the area of social and psychoanalytic theory -- centering around questions of identity, subjectivity, and selfhood in relation to a peculiar notion that theorists term ‘the other.’  As the realm of theory has expanded to encompass a broader range of disciplines, perspectives, and voices, the enigmatic concept of the other has been appropriated and stretched accordingly.  Patricia J. Williams’ book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, provides a compelling look at modern conceptions of the other set amidst a series of political and personal essays relating to her real-life experiences as an African- American commercial lawyer and Professor of Law. In this essay, I propose to examine Williams’ work, focusing in particular on her interpretation and application of the concept of the other as well as her illustrations of the relationship between this concept and the continued race/rights problems which plague modern society.

In the beginning of Williams’ text, she first introduces the concept of the ‘other’ specifically in reference to herself and other members of the black community.  Williams admits to preferring the term “African-American” in her conversational usage, but she specifically chooses to use the term “black” in her book to emphasize, as she phrases it, “ the unshaded monolithism of color itself as a social force”  (257).  The other then, in Williams’ usage, is incarnate – one is born, as she was, into this concrete “biological catastrophe,” this “fearsome, loathsome packaging of an ‘other’ body” (4).  To be born black, according to this paradigm, is quite literally to ‘embody’ a threatening otherness in relation and in direct opposition to being born as the white self.  To be born black is to be the source of fear, to become the dangerous outsider whom some feel should be controlled, contained, jailed, and – in the furthest extreme -- even castrated, sterilized, or killed.

When Williams speaks of the harm done by splitting ‘self’ from ‘other,’ it is usually in reference to two or more distinct, separate individuals or groups of individuals, although through the course of the text she touches on both the literal as well as the figurative “separation of the white self from the black other” (62).  Rather than consistently conceptualizing this ‘other’ as a particular aspect of everyone’s own, individual identity -- such as the unconscious – her concept predominantly refers to another completely and utterly distinct person.  She points out that little in our culture “encourages looking at others as part of ourselves” (62-63), and considering the fact that blackness is so often equated with negativity, this comes as no particular surprise.   Our culture, in fact, “does not make all selves or I’s the servants of others, but only some” (62-63).  What little ‘selfhood’ is allotted to blacks by our society is, according to Williams, only given to the extent that the black self will become dominated and obliterated by, as well as “subservient” to, the all-powerful white other, “with no reciprocity” (64).

Williams describes members of her race as the “social actors whose traditional legal status has been the isolation of oxymoron, of oddity, of outsider” (7).  She often highlights the legacy of slavery  -- evident in many different permutations today -- including the mindset that consigns blacks to their status as ‘other’, as three-fifths of a person, as property.  For instance, Williams’ thoughts often return to the life of her great-great grandmother, a slave in the rural South.  She imagines the young girl trying to please her white owner/the father of her children -- a man “who truly did not know [she] was human, whose entire belief system resolutely defined [her] as animal, chattel, talking cow” (18).  After the Civil War, while the letter of the law technically ‘freed’ slaves, Williams highlights the fact that blacks merely shifted from one form of ‘otherness’ to an ulterior one.  They were not “emancipated” but both “unowned” and “disowned” or “thrust . . . outside the marketplace of rights” (21).  Blacks were “placed beyond the bounds of valuation,” just like all of society’s ‘others’ across history -- the poor, homeless, nomads, gypsies, and tribal peoples – and consigned “to some collective public state of mind, known alternatively as ‘menace’ or ‘burden’” (21-22).

Blacks’ self-definition, both during their bondage and afterwards, thus has been and is hindered by many voices coming from outside themselves.  In the ultimate irony, readers eventually learn that the “packaging of an ‘other’ body” is apparently not only “fearsome and loathsome” (4) to whites, but sometimes, as Williams posits, even to blacks themselves.  She insists that:

The distancing does not stop with the separation of the white self from the black other.  In addition, the cultural domination of blacks by whites means that the black self is placed from a distance even from itself, as in my example of blacks being asked to put themselves in the position of the white shopkeepers who scrutinize them.  So blacks in a white society are conditioned from infancy to see in themselves only what others, who despise them, see (62).

Readers can find this principle vividly illustrated in Williams’ recollections of her childhood ‘discovery’ of her own color.  She is horrified to discover she is “one of them” (119), a sentiment we later hear echoed in the voice of the white woman railing against the homeless as “those men” who are dangerous and as “those people” who should not be allowed on “her” streets (135).  Not surprisingly, the title of one chapter in Alchemy is:  “Owning the Self in a Disowned World”; it is quite appropriately named, because all of the ‘others’ in her book must constantly fight against self-definitions imposed upon them from the world outside themselves, a world which has essentially disowned them.

Williams stresses the fact that while slavery, discrimination, and prejudice no longer exist as legally sanctioned institutions, they are still quite active today in people’s minds and attitudes.  The legacy of slavery “survives as powerful and invisibly reinforcing structures of thought, language, and law” (61).  Continually she returns to the fact that the black other (or indeed any ‘other’) is acted upon, thus receiving and being the object of the action of the white self.  She mentions, for instance, being designated “nonblack for the purposes of inclusion and black for the purposes of exclusion” and feeling “the boundaries of [her] body manipulated, casually inscribed by definitional demarcations” (10).  For both the other and the object, then, “being seen is the precise measure of existence” (28).

Williams soon expands her initial definition of the other to include a similar grouping originally rooted in notions of biology and property -- the female sex. While she can casually joke about how speaking “as black, female, and commercial lawyer has rendered [her] simultaneously universal, trendy, and marginal” (6-7), her experience of being ‘othered’ on multiple levels has hardly been a laughing matter. The concept eventually grows again beyond the stricture of biology – such as in the case the transsexual student. Williams eventually acknowledges the problem as having less to do with “biology” than with the rhetorical “semiotics of power relations, of dominance and submission, of assertion and deference, of big and little” (12).

At work here, among other things, is John Stuart Mill’s “tyranny of the majority” and “tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling” (Williams 43).  She places Mills’ insights in more concrete terms by describing her own experiences and feelings as both law student and as law professor.  Her mother pushed her daughter forward into the world as “the projection of a competent self . . . a masculine rather than a feminine self” and hid “the lonely, black, defiled-female part of herself” (217).  It is no wonder that Williams found herself struggling with conflicting feelings of alienation.  Her experience included, for instance, heightened senses of invisibility and visibility which Williams explains as the “product of [her] not being part of the larger cultural picture . . . concocted from a perceptual consensus” to which she – as an ‘other’ on multiple levels --  “is not a party” (56).

Williams also describes a number of problematic features of legal thought that often confirm and perpetuate prejudice against the other.  She points, for instance, at the “paradigm of larger social perceptions that divide public from private, black from white, dispossessed from legitimate”  (7).  In a statement reminiscent of Derrida and his critique of loaded hierarchical binaries, she criticizes this “hypostatization of exclusive categories and definitional polarities . . . moral/immoral, public/private, white/black” (8).  To this list Williams eventually adds self/other, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, and many other such binaries where one side of the pair is always preferred as somehow better or more deserving than the other.  She highlights the close bond between language and thought, but emphasizes that even when words such as “discrimination” and “segregation” are stricken from our collective vocabulary or transformed in the interest of neutrality, their corrupting influence is often safely intact.

Williams only barely skims the edge of the possibility that the other could also signify the unconscious or some similar counterpart of the self inside all people.  Her closest encounter with this theory occurs as she ponders the racially motivated murder of a black civil-rights worker who was stabbed thirty-nine times.  Hearing about the incident, Williams wonders  “what could not be killed by the fourth, fifth, or even tenth knife blow; what sort of thing would not die with the body but lived on in the mind of the murderer”  (72).  She continues this train of thought by admitting the possibility, “as psychologists have argued,” that the white attacker was trying to kill “a part of his own mind’s image, a part of himself” (72).  Williams soon backs swiftly away, though, and insists that whatever the nature of this “part,” it is “not a real other” (72).  With this strangely cryptic comment, Williams confirms her commitment to defining the ‘other’ in terms of a certain distinctly separate individual whose other status remains essentially fixed and constant at all times.  She posits an otherness that is not merely experienced for the single, transitory instant required for a particular individual to project some dark part of himself outwards.

On this same tangent, she continues by criticizing our belief in the existence of another, equally peculiar ‘quasi-other,’ another similarly misconceived product of the mind rather than of reality.  These supposedly “objective, ‘unmediated’ voices” often manage to take on a life – although not an actual living, breathing body -- of their own in the strange figure she refers to as the “Idealized Other whose gaze provides us with either internalized censure or externalized approval” (9).  This “godlike,” “generalized, legitimating” Other serves the interest of the majority and is invoked in order to “make property of others beyond the self, all the while denying such connections” (11).  Ironically, these immaterial Others – personified, seemingly transcendent, and dubbed with titles like the “Noble Savage” or the “Real American” (9) – are often able to exert far more influence than the average living, breathing individual.

She also cites the controversial case involving Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly black woman killed by one of several white police officers enforcing a questionably-legal eviction.  Williams again wonders about “the ‘why,’ the animus that inspired such fear and impatient contempt in a police officer that the presence of six other well-armed mean could not allay his need to kill” (144). Whether the source of the concept of the other springs completely from inside an individual or is fed from without, the result is always essentially negative in Williams’ estimation.  She once again skims the edge of other-as-unconscious when she highlights the anxieties many whites have about blacks as the “overwhelming other” (66). The reader is reminded that it is only “in the minds of whites that blacks become large, threatening, powerful, uncontrollable, ubiquitous, and supernatural” (72).  She emphasizes the “system of formalized distortions of thought” which produce “social structures centered on fear and hate, a tumorous outlet for feelings elsewhere unexpressed” (73). The Alchemy of Race and Rights provides a powerful and sometimes painful reminder that history is still repeating itself.  There is hope, though, but only if our realization of the limitations of these systems and social structures is followed by the formation of new models for human interaction.
 
 

Williams, Patricia.  The Alchemy of Race and Rights.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1991.
 
 

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