The keynote lecture on Whitman’s second annual Symposium on Diversity and Community last Monday night almost did not happen.
Patricia J. Williams, the Columbia University law professor and columnist for The Nation magazine who was slated to speak, experienced a flight delay that left her stranded in an airport in Denver for hours. Though she was scheduled to arrive early in the afternoon and have dinner with faculty and organizers, her flight into town landed only minutes before the lecture had to begin and she took the stage immediately following her arrival on campus.
Interspersing sociological analyses with humorous personal anecdotes, Williams spoke on the state of affairs of race and identity as they exist in the United States today. She identified this particular moment in American history as a pivotal crossroads. At the same time, she lamented the decline of true political activism and the lack of relevant and accurate information provided by the modern media.
Throughout her lecture, Williams touched upon the civil rights movement of the ’60s, eugenics, movies, journalism and the 2008 primaries. She tied them all together into a one conclusion: Racial and gender discrimination is still very much alive in contemporary times, and there’s still much work to be done.
“[Williams] has a brilliant intellectual mind, but she has a way of expressing her ideas in a way that is incredibly accessible,” said history professor Julie Charlip. “She stands up there and she tells these wonderful stories, which are very funny, but there’s also a very clear message that we need to think carefully about the political situation in the country and the way things are being presented to us.”
“I was really excited to go see Patricia Williams because we read her in Alt Core last semester,” said sophomore Seth Bergeson. “Her book was amazing. I loved the lecture, she was a skilled speaker with a lot of great content. I joked with my friends about this: if we could combine Patricia Williams’ content with Salman Rushdie’s speaking style to make a superhuman speaking machine…that would really be something.”
Junior Tim Shadix echoed these sentiments and felt that Williams’ lecture fulfilled an oft-ignored niche in campus event bookings.
“It was nice to hear a speaker talk about politics and current events, because that’s not something we usually hear a lot of at Whitman,” said Shadix. “I felt like her speech was a bit disjointed, but that was okay because it looked like she was doing a lot of thinking on the spot. She provided a lot of entertaining real life examples relating to the things she was talking about.”
Williams was born in 1951 in a racially segregated Boston neighborhood where hers was the only black family while she was growing up. She belongs to the generation that entered school shortly after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, and questions about race and identity were part and parcel of her everyday childhood life.
“I can’t remember not being aware of race on some level,” said Williams in an e-mail. “My earliest recollections were of being singled out as ‘the colored kid.'”
“Perhaps because I was so young when I had to consider all this, I think of [the fight against racism] as just part of the routine of what one does to live fully,” said Williams. “You always have to push a bit, struggle some, act in ways that hold the door open for the next person behind you.”
In 2000, Williams won the MacArthur Fellowship, a no-strings-attached $500,000 genius grant. She is currently writing a column in The Nation magazine called “Diaries of a Mad Law Professor.” Her book, “The Alchemy of Race and Rights,” is one of the required readings for the Critical and Alternative Voices class.
