An Interview with Patricia J. Williams

Abstract

An Interview with Patricia J. Williams Charles H. Rowell The following interview was conducted by telephone on December 5, 1996, between Charlottesville, Virginia, and New York City. ROWELL: You, a professor of law at Columbia University, have been described as a public intellectual. What does that description mean to you as a new intellectual and as a professional in the traditional sense? WILLIAMS: I think Cornel West uses the term in a fashion that links it to the history of public intellectuals of a generation or two ago. In this sense, I think employing the term is an attempt to put debates about race in some sort of philosophical line with debates about citizenship and inclusion and the role of the academic. I also think that from my own point of view as a lawyer the necessity of being a public intellectual is almost a foregone conclusion. I was a public interest lawyer before I went into academia. The cases that I handled frequently involved the welfare and interests of large groups of people. It was important as a trial lawyer to be able to argue from principles and abstractions to specific applications that affected real people’s lives. And so that aspect of what it means to be a public intellectual, I think, I probably brought from my practice of the profession to my academic concerns. ROWELL: You mentioned “public intellectuals of a generation or two ago.” Specifically, who are the people you are referring to? What was the focus of their discourse? Are they related in any way to the current group of black public intellectuals, an assemblage that includes Cornel West, bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates, Kimberle Crenshaw, as well as yourself? Then, too, there is novelist Toni Morrison who, as editor of books on the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy and on the national response to the O.J. Simpson case, for example, writes and works as the public intellectual. WILLIAMS: I guess I was thinking of the intellectual movement associated with journals like the old Partisan Review. A group of thinkers centered in New York, indeed Columbia University, whose academic concerns were broad enough to include the political and social cauldron of their day. This is not to say that we are specifically the inheritors of that tradition, but I do think there are analogies to be made. In terms of contribution to public discussion, I’d like to be considered within that tradition, but again I think that as a lawyer, it’s something that comes with the territory as well. [End Page 823] ROWELL: As I read and reread The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991) and The Rooster’s Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (1995), I am convinced each time that I should refer to you as a creative intellectual. By this I mean the intellectual who, like the poet and the novelist for example, grounds or frames her/his presentation of ideas in the personal or private, therefore allowing general readers access to complex ideas or issues that were formerly closed to them. I argue that one of your extraordinary talents is your ability to combine the sensibilities of a writer as artist and those of the intellectual as post-structuralist in the creation of riveting texts that, through their eloquence and elegance, inform us of who we are as a culture, past and present. WILLIAMS: Well, thank you. I think that I do try to employ rhetoric in particular ways to be persuasive; again it seems to me to be part of what is meant for me to be a trial lawyer, for example. I would call hypotheticals, examples, parables, illustrations as what you described as private stories. I’m not sure they are truly private because I do consider myself as trying to play a role as a public advocate of certain ideas, and I’m no longer in the private role of representing a specific client. So I use parable to structure certain parts of my stories as allegories. Trial lawyers have always done that, politicians have always done that, philosophers have always done that. I use hypotheticals, I use scenarios, I...