The Alchemy of Race and Rights

This book, by a lawyer and professor of commercial law who is the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer, is both an argument for affirming group claims in the legal vocabulary and a description of the seemingly ineluctable status of black people in the US.

Patricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. Her book is both an argument for affirming group claims in the legal vocabulary and a description of the seemingly ineluctable status of black people in the United States today, whether they be professional men and women or the hungry and desperate.

PART I:
Excluding Voices: A Necklace of Thoughts on the Ideology of Style
1. The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea
2. Gilded Lilies and Liberal Guilt
3. The Death of the Profane
PART II:
Trial by Text: A Sequence of Sublimation
4. Teleology on the Rocks
5. Crimes Without Passion
6. The Obliging Shell
PART III:
Ladder to the Light: A Series of Hinged Turning Points
7. Fire and Ice
8. The Pain of Word Bondage
9. Mirrors and Windows
PART IV:
The Incorruptible Simplicity of Being: A String of Crystalline Paroles
10. Owning the Self in a Disowned World
11. Arm's-Length Intimacies
12. On Being the Object of Property

Notes
A Word on Categories
Acknowledgments
Index