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Ask a Feminist: Patricia Williams Discusses Rage and Humor as an Act of Disobedience with Carla Kaplan and Durba Mitra

Patricia Williams, Carla Kaplan, and Durba Mitra

The following conversation took place over Zoom in fall 2020. An edited transcript is below. A longer version of the interview will appear in the special issue of Signs on "Rage," to be published in summer 2021.

Listen to the conversation and subscribe to the Ask a Feminist podcast.

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[social_warfare]

Carla Kaplan (CK): I am Carla Kaplan, and today Durba Mitra and I will be in conversation with Patricia Williams for the special issue of Signs on "Rage." And it is an enormous privilege to be in conversation today with Professor Patricia Williams, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University School of Law. Talking about rage, COVID-19, and the ongoing political struggles that define this moment, including the Movement for Black Lives. Dr. Williams has published widely in the areas of race, gender, feminism, and law. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991), The Rooster’s Egg (1995), Seeing a Color-Blind Future (1997), and Open House (2004). Her extraordinary long-running series, Diary of a Mad Law Professor in the Nation; her many essays for journals such as Ms., and her numerous academic articles and essays have been foundational for feminist scholarship and advocacy today. I've had the pleasure over the last few weeks of rereading all your books, which are absurdly annotated, but I’ve had the pleasure of rereading everything for this interview. 

But one of the things that struck me on this rereading, and it really struck me because you have the tendency to describe yourself, particularly in contrast to your sister, as having a grimmer outlook. As being somebody who can't release the weight of the world's negativity. But one of the signature qualities of your work is how brilliantly and deftly you use humor. The first essay of Alchemy (1991), in which you construct the fictional conversation between you as law professor and your sister? It's really funny. You know, you go into this incredible legal jargon and you spin out these formulae, and she says “Polar bears? What do you mean?” And it struck me so hard, because this has been a moment when so many of us are finding any laughter really difficult. When everybody feels grim, feels weighted by not just rage but a kind of exhaustion, a kind of depression. And yet you find ways to be wonderfully humorous. 

Patricia Williams (PW): Well, I do think that my outlook on the political landscape was grim when I was writing this, long-term. And I actually think that what I was worried about has come to pass. I think that's why, much to my consternation, Alchemy in particular is so resonant today, because nothing has changed. It's gotten worse. And what philosopher Lynne Tirrell described as genocidal language has its own viral load. So, I do think that I am grim, but about certain things. I think what you described as humor is a particular kind of humor. I do have a deep sense of the absurd. One of my earliest recollections is my Aunt Sophie saying that that three-year-old child over there has a keen sense of the absurd. It’s not so much a ha-ha sense of humor. I don't do puns. I think there are so many varieties of humor, but I think that if I have any skill in what one might think of as humor, it is to take two things that seem so inconsistent and to join them in ways that bring to the fore the cognitive dissonance that they're embedded in. You don't hear it until you play it out and put them together, and they become jarring, and that feels like a funny moment. And I think that also goes to the sense of voice that you pointed to in the excerpt from which you read. It does not clearly [reflect] the true voice of my sister, but there's something parodic of both of us, it’s a send-up of both of us, in terms of taking the hyper-exaggerated legal voice and the hyper-exaggerated intimate familial voice which she represents; of taking a Cartesian sense of the logical positivistic scientific voice and pairing it with something that is fictional and ephemeral, the rabbit ghosts for example. I think that was another conversation with my sister, but we’re actually talking about the same thing. I'm not talking about rabbit ghosts in reality. I'm trying to illustrate the affective echo that clings to even the most scientistic and positivistic formulations. So that’s what I’m trying to do, and I think it often seems funny and ha-ha laugh-aloud in ways that can also be a sort of Edward Gorey grim. 

Durba Mitra (DM): You know, I was thinking of the same dialogue. That dialogue between you and your sister is so striking because it's funny, and as you say, it's grim, but it's also a relief. It’s the relief of self-recognition. How many of us have had to explain, that Cartesian, hyper-rational form of thinking that we do, to that person sitting next to us? The grimness is something that we sit with. However much we talk about these supposedly objective things, these scientific things, that we know the affect, we live within the affect. And that's so much of the power of your work: you always bring us back to our bodies. It's just such an important thing for me as a feminist. So I'm really happy to be in conversation with you.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Humor is…the expressive side of what I am constantly told not to say, so it's an act of disobedience, frequently. It's the dissenting voice that says, 'wait a second, you've left out the most important facts.'' --Patricia Williams" quote="Humor is…the expressive side of what I am constantly told not to say, so it's an act of disobedience, frequently. It's the dissenting voice that says, 'wait a second, you've left out the most important facts.'" theme="style2"]

PW: It also feels like that humor is very much linked and is the portal to a sense of outrage, frequently, which sort of brings us back to the theme of this. I do feel like my humor is very linked--I wouldn’t have used the word grim, but it’s the expressive side of what I am constantly told not to say, so it's an act of disobedience, frequently. It's the dissenting voice that says, "wait a second, you've left out the most important facts, you left out the actual indent on the body, and that's distressing." I think that range of emotion, whether we call it truth or distress or stress or outrage, is frequently right at the edge of what I call the absurd.

CK: I think for many of us, for many feminists, part of what is so difficult about the contemporary crisis is this sense of its absurdity, and I’m so glad you introduced the notion of the absurd. Many of us are still struggling to understand how we got from Barack Obama, as a nation, to Donald Trump. It really is an absurd political moment; it's a moment that is absurd in  all the wrong ways. We wanted to ask you about the kinds of emotions, the kinds of affects, these absurdities, that this crisis is creating—about some of the differences between affects like depression, rage, and outrage—and if you had any feelings about the most useful affects for us to try to mobilize, to try to work with, and what are the ones we need to try to set aside?

PW: I’m so cautious about whether I want to own being a humorist in these books, because humor is so frequently misunderstood. I think the answer to how we got to this moment is Donald Trump's very performative use of a particular brand of humor, a particularly cruel type of humor. And there are many types of humor. Mine is about certain kinds of absurd juxtapositions. His is the kind of humor that mocks, that makes fun of, that marks difference and implants a sense of hierarchy but at the same time disowns the cruelty in it by saying, “Oh, it was only a joke,” or “it's only satire.” I think cruelty masked by laughter is a very, very powerful tool of autocrats and awful people, frankly. 

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Trump's is the kind of humor that mocks, that makes fun of, that marks difference and implants a sense of hierarchy but at the same time disowns the cruelty in it by saying, 'Oh, it was only a joke.'' --Patricia Williams" quote="Trump's is the kind of humor that mocks, that makes fun of, that marks difference and implants a sense of hierarchy but at the same time disowns the cruelty in it by saying, “Oh, it was only a joke.'" theme="style2"]

I mentioned this, I think, in The Rooster’s Egg as well as in Open House: when shock jocks were first licensed to do what they were doing (we had a breakdown in terms of fairness in broadcasting), you had Rush Limbaugh, you had Bob Grant, you had a host of personalities that have become the staples who have now bled into the corporate structure of Fox News. I remember many people saying, “Oh no, I don't believe a thing he says, but he's so funny. Rush Limbaugh is so funny.” It did not seem funny to me because I was on the other side. My body was on the other side of his jokes about black people, about bones in the nose, about politics. His humor from the start was a divisive one which was at the expense of certain bodies but not others, which ended up with the schoolyard bully on top and the bleeding weakling on the ground., That kind of mockery, of Donald Trump when he imitated a reporter with a certain kind of cerebral palsy: this isn't funny. It's bullying. The laughing that happened on the Capitol steps with the kids from Covington Catholic. People may grow up, but I also worry that it was dismissed, not for it being bad behavior, but because it was just a joke or he didn’t mean it. That cruel smiling that was captured of that young man, face to face with a Native American elder, has too many echoes in our history-- of, for example, the young children you see in postcards from the 1920s and 30s, who were smiling at lynchings. This echo of a certain kind of cruel smile is really, really troubling about this moment.

I don’t feel particularly hypnotized by this man, as many people do, so I don’t think that anything he says is a joke. He's clearly not joking. Look at the full-page ad he took out about the Central Park Five. I don’t understand why as much of it is perceived as a joke and I think that it's performative, and I think that's why he gets away with it. He dresses like a 1930s version of Mr. Moneybags in the Monopoly game. His coat is a little long, his tie a little long, he's like a circus ringleader. He's an impresario in a very, very intentional sense, so I think even when he's deadly serious, people miss it. I did a column about this, the degree to which he was not joking when he looked at his rally and said, “My people, my people, they love me so much that I can stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody.” He literally seriously takes his finger and does a finger-pointing gun motion. He was not joking at that moment. People take it as a joke because they're still riding high on the performativity of it, but that's very much what he then invokes when he says “when the looting starts the shooting starts.” Or when he sends unmarked federal troops into Oregon, or when he charges peaceful dissenters with felonies, and we need to put those felony charges together with the fact that most states have some form of felony disenfranchisement, which means that their voting rights and their right to sit on juries is endangered. 

We are following so many policies that are clearly against not just the best interests of designated minorities or women or migrants:  the idea that we should all just get out and go shopping, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, in order to hold up the golem of the economy and sacrifice ourselves for that. I think that we clearly have to continue living, but the idea that we're doing this without any unified federal coherent policy about providing PPE for our essential workers, and by essential workers I don't just mean hospital workers but also meatpacking plants, the people who are mopping the floors of hospitals, who are handling the dead. And the response to this incoherence is that we just forge ahead and say, "some people are going to die anyway; we're all going to die anyway." This is a kind of crazy, that we behave so much against our self-interests that it’s almost suicidal, in the face of what we cannot imagine. You know, the deadly powerful force that we can't suspend our [economic] activity or support, as some European countries do--very imperfectly--but that we‘re not going  to evict half of our population, that we’re going to provide stimulus checks, that we’re going to rework food distribution systems. If it isn't within a model of the market, we don't know what to do. We have so done away with the discourse of public interest, of public health, of public community, that we don't even know how to think about it. And so that's why the economy becomes more important than public health: we’ve forgotten how to even talk about it.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'If it isn't within a model of the market, we don't know what to do. We have so done away with the discourse of public interest, of public health, of public community, that we don't even know how to think about it.' --Patricia Williams" quote="If it isn't within a model of the market, we don't know what to do. We have so done away with the discourse of public interest, of public health, of public community, that we don't even know how to think about it." theme="style2"]

DM: I think one of the key ideas you mention is the absurdity of this moment, and the outrage. But, you know, the funny thing is, when we read your books from 1991, you recognized the absurdity before. You've always known the absurdity. Meaning to say that it's not Donald Trump, [but] that the racism we live with now has always been there. And I think of your citation of the lynching postcard—we've always lived with a set of people who have lived by a death drive of sorts. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the long term, because we can talk about outrage in this moment, but really how outrage in American society has always been conceptualized by Black feminist thought, and how Black feminist theory can help us think about thinking about outrage. I'm thinking about this especially because of the way you describe yourself as the Mad Law Professor, or the question of madness or intelligent rage. It is really Black women, more than anyone, whose outrage has been either misrecognized or dismissed entirely. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how Black feminist theorizing around rage might be productive for thinking not only about the outrage of our moment but more broadly, for a long tradition of thinking about rage.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'There is a particular expression of Black women... in this country whose voices have been stymied and silenced. And when you express it, it gets called 'Oh, you're just crazy.' And being called crazy makes me angry.' --Patricia Williams" quote="There is a particular expression of Black women... in this country whose voices have been stymied and silenced. And when you express it, it gets called 'Oh, you're just crazy.' And being called crazy makes me angry." theme="style2"]

PW: There is a particular expression of Black women, particularly descendants of slaves, in this country, whose voices have been stymied and silenced. And when you express it, it gets called “Oh, you're just crazy.” And being called crazy makes me angry, which is why I adopted Mad Law Professor, because it has that double sense of madness as a way of expressing that Catch-22 of never being heard for the substance of it but simply, “Oh your tone is either crazy or too angry to be paid attention to. It's too extreme in its force, rather than its substance.” The question of #BlackLivesMatter being founded by three women, African American women, is very particular to this moment, but at the same time, Black men have a contextualized sense of how to express one's anger. The figure of Barack Obama could never be angry. People kept saying, “Why doesn't he get angry at the birthers?” He can't. Black men are being killed for expressing discomfort with these situations. And the feedback [in response] to Black Lives Matter being, “Well, white lives matter too,” is contextual to a sense of your testimony about your particular lived experiences being dismissed. So if my voice is heard as a Black feminist voice, I would like it to be representative of a collective experience that is both particular but also has elements that ought to be identifiable across all kinds of boundaries, not just American but international boundaries as well. What are the metrics of when somebody is silenced and they are suffering, and what are the circumstances under which one dismisses it as madness, or plays with humor? 

I've been thinking particularly of one of the books I teach, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, about the Junta in Argentina and his being imprisoned and watching the prison guards mock him and mock his body and make fun of his body. I'm thinking of Sander Gilman’s book, The Jew’s Body, of very particular physical attributes being mocked and made fun of. And the affect of the dimension of gender being made fun of in the Weimar [Republic]. So when Donald Trump talks about "nasty women," it isn't just what they said. I mean, nasty is a word that children use about sexual putrification. So there's an affective dimension that is specifically gendered, that isn't just about the fact that “Oh, she has a bad temper.” It's about the fact that, you know, she smells. And he brings all of that, but that was also a feature of how Jewish women were described. And so, this is a long history. Nothing Donald Trump says, really, can’t be traced to long histories, and I think that is another part of his power. He takes long histories, and you know it's been commented, how much of his rhetoric, [for example about] looting and shooting, goes back to segregation. We have such a poor sense of history that I think the ability to actually match the history to those particular phrases is lost at our peril, because if we have lost a sense of those words, they are nevertheless resonant at a deep cultural level. They are built into the framework of how we think, even if we don't remember the particular circumstances in which they first originated. 

The “China Flu” isn’t new. It goes all the way back to the condemnation of Chinese citizens, to those who were struggling for citizenship in the United States, to the migrants who built the railways. The ghettoization of Chinese [people into] Chinatown; when there was an outbreak of typhus or smallpox or both in San Francisco—obviously, those diseases affect everybody, but they were blamed because of precisely the same density issues we're facing with COVID, which disproportionately affects populations of color right now—it was blamed on the Chinese population and Chinatown, and ultimately those ethnic resentments resulted in things like the Chinese Exclusion Act. 

We have forgotten about the history of Typhoid Mary, as she was disparagingly called. That was a woman named Mary Malone, who was an asymptomatic carrier of typhus. When it was found out that she was spreading it throughout wealthy families for whom she worked as a laundress or a cook, it was not just resentment that she continued to evade the public health authorities but that she was Irish and [seen as] slovenly. Those habits of thought and of structures of moving from singular to plural--it's almost a grammatical habit that we have--that allow for the rotation and the recirculation and the resurgence of these kinds of markings and mockery. That even when the particular words aren’t familiar, it’s the grammatical relations that we're seeing now. Trump is very good at raising and recirculating these. 

DM: Over a year ago, in the Nation, you wrote that we're living through a time of emergency, and how true it is now. I'm thinking of this time of emergency in relation to questions of privacy and property because of your scholarship and how it has transformed how we think about these ideas from everything on race, gender, and property to the place of technology. Right now, we hear of incidents of domestic violence, so this kind of other realm of property law, dramatically increasing during the pandemic. And we all, of course, acutely know the unequal forms of household labor and the way the private has been ascribed a position in terms of the question of household labor and housework and how that has transformed as a result of the pandemic. And then of course we see transformative social movements like Moms for Housing, where Black women in Oakland are reclaiming foreclosed homes to fight foreclosure and homelessness, which, as you pointed out earlier in our conversation, the homelessness crisis is about to get much worse. There’s no possibility that it’s going to get any better at this point. So, I wonder if you might think with us a little bit about privacy, property, and domesticity now? How might we reflect on this question of privacy and domesticity in the current crisis? 

PW: I worry about privacy [being conceived of] as a form of property and unduly located in private property. If one were to look at the old Greek sphere of the Domus, it really is literally within one's house. If one doesn't have a house, if one is not in one’s house, one has no expectation of privacy. But I think that privacy ought to be linked with the question of human dignity. It doesn’t thread easily through American constitutional discourse, it's much more present in European human rights discourse. In the United States, we don't talk about human rights, we talk about civil rights, and those rights tend to be conscribed or held private to citizenship and excluding others as opposed to [being understood as] broadly human rights. For me, privacy is about the care of the integrity of one's body, so privacy needs to be linked to the public sphere as well. As in, the question of the limits of surveillance. Privacy and surveillance go hand in hand. 

[click_to_tweet tweet="'I worry about privacy {being conceived of} as a form of property and unduly located in private property. ... But I think that privacy ought to be linked with the question of human dignity.' --Patricia Williams" quote="I worry about privacy {being conceived of} as a form of property and unduly located in private property. ... But I think that privacy ought to be linked with the question of human dignity." theme="style2"]

The question of surveillance in this moment is that so many people are making supposedly private choices to say "yes, it's okay, you can have access to all my information" every time we turn on a computer. You know, opening up the entire range of our shopping habits, but also our browsing habits, everything we do becoming the property of marketing companies or Google or Amazon or whatever. But then [our data is] redistributed, because those are really the assets of those companies—our DNA, everything. It becomes redistributed to new incentive channels when we open our computers, since our entire heads are being sucked into it. These really reformulate our norms and our values and everything else. And so, we are giving rise to a kind of laissez-faire form of the Chinese credit system. And the Chinese credit system surveys every aspect of every citizen’s life, from their kindergarten records, to their jaywalking records, to what they pay in bills and taxes, and then spills into that incentive systems about whether you can leave your province, or whether or not you have to earn your way back up to the ability to travel. And it seems to me that that's what we're risking at this point, with this heavy level of Siri in our homes: there are no boundaries. The old-fashioned Domus, and the notion of an economic sphere, is all about individual choice, which proceeds from the household into the market. Technology’s made all that so porous, and then transferred a certain level of influence and control into corporations who are not accountable to us in any sense. But they're acting like governments, and they’re governing our actions in all kinds of really substantive ways, and we have no constitutional limit on that. And so, there has to be a new technological regime, and of course that would threaten the accumulation of profits for very, very large, trillion-dollar companies like Amazon, Apple, and so forth. But some of this has to be redistributed in ways that are for the public good, the public benefit, and are not simply about examining and extracting what we mean by the private at this point. And that surveillance is not just about policing on the streets, it's also about policing in every other aspect of our lives: “See what you're doing and see how we can make you more profitable.” 

DM: It's so striking to again go back to Alchemy (1991), and that first chapter where you talk about what it means to be the subject of property. The object of property. That resonating form. That it's not who you are, that you have always been objectified as a kind of property. It's really interesting and striking to link that to what you're describing here. 

CK: I'm interested in picking up the discussion of resentment that you were having in broad terms and using it to come back to issues of affect. but in much more specific terms. In a recent essay of yours, “Stop Getting Married on Plantations,” you talked about having to feel a kind of resentment on behalf of Black and Brown women, who have to constantly parse microaggressions: "Was this intentional? Did the person on the plane know what they were saying? Do they mean to be dancing on the graves of my ancestors? Do they understand what they're referencing, what is meant here?" And I started thinking from that, about all of the ways in which we're looking at this moment of emergency, this moment of crisis, of a really disproportional labor burden of affect. That we have a really disproportional affective labor going on where the burden of outrage does not fall equally on all of us. And where Black and Brown bodies, in particularly Black and Brown women, have to assume a really disproportionate burden of outrage. 

PW: It's stressful to be on the receiving end of collective misperceptions that one might less kindly call ignorance or assumption or prejudice or prejudgments. To judge somebody without knowing them, the license and the cultural habit of thinking you know everything about somebody else and then judging them without checking in is the essence of prejudice, or seeing one person and knowing somebody who seems to have the same skin color, and therefore, they must be exactly the same. That move from the singular to the plural, or the lumpification of all people. It seems to me that that's not necessarily about race, it's not necessarily about gender. But the degree to which our norms and our culture permit certain people to make those presumptions and other people to have to respond to them or endure them. Or if they observe them, “wait a second, what the hell are you talking about? You’re misrepresenting me.” The open-heartedness to learn from one’s own ignorance when it gets pointed out to one, rather than...  I think that that’s why, at moments like this, when certain very uncomfortable things are on the table, we just need to bring more boxes of Kleenex to the table as well, but not to take these topics off the table. I also think that it helps to remember that talking about race is a kind of taboo in our culture. I'm so happy that Isabel Wilkerson’s book about caste is on the bestseller list right now because certainly one of the characteristics of caste is not just the out-of-placeness, you don't belong here, you're on the other side of the red line geography. There is a cartographic, a geographic sense of displacement. But there is also, who has the ability to talk back, not just to talk, but to talk back? And to talk about race at all in a culture that is committed to saying, “I don't even see race. I don't even see race,” even when you clearly only say that when you are seeing race and your eyeballs are about to fall out because you're so struck by how Black this person is and all you can do is protest, “I don't even see you. I don't see you.” And so, this incredible sense of “I don't see you” is a taboo, it's a pushing back. Let's not talk about race. Race makes people uncomfortable, because it's a horrible history and you don't want to feel blamed or you want to feel innocent. You want to feel perfect. 

CK: As feminists, we have a long history of having to live with the perception and often the self-perception as Sara Ahmed puts it, of being killjoys. And I'm wondering if, in terms of what you're describing, this aversion to the difficult and to the uncomfortable, if as feminists who've had to live with being killjoys for a long time, we have particular tools in our tool chest for this, particular resources? If feminists have something specific to offer [at this] moment? 

PW: You know, I do think this brings it full circle. For me it's humor. I mean, I know I sort of disavowed humor. But I do think I have practiced humor to take the edge off some of the more pointed things I have to say to some of my students or to some of my colleagues or in political settings. To do things that make it a little bit funny or to take the emotional intensity, to sort of provide a professional hug, which is a very difficult thing because I don't want to be the hugger. This is what women always do: we have to hug, and we have to comfort. We have to do all that. But how to keep this on the table is something that I do think that is part of women's labor, but it's also about Black labor. It's why Martin Luther King framed his revolution in terms of love. But I do think [we have to be able] to talk straightforwardly and not to have to remind you, “Oh really, I love you, I don't want to hurt your feelings.” This is where the labor really, really comes in, and so I’ve told Sara Ahmed, I am a happy killjoy. And I hope people laugh at that, but [this] is an attempt not to have to pussyfoot around the fact that [it] may hurt your feelings when I tell you that you’re drawing from a legacy of slavery. And it's so hard to do because I think the moment you become a killjoy, you do risk losing it at some point. 

There are moments when my nerves become frayed and [I] don't want this to end in a big catfight, or people walking away and never talking again. I mean, there's a lot that has happened in the last few months, particularly around Black Lives Matter. I've heard people of all races saying, “I am just tired. I don't want to talk to anybody who's white. I don't want to talk to this. I don't want to talk to that. I don't want to talk to anybody who is Black. I’m tired of hearing about this. I tried to be an ally, but you didn't…” And I think that this requires a very long-term commitment. The commitment is to walk away when you're flooded but to come back and to pursue it past that point, because nobody expects this to be without a lot of pain. This is painful.  I understand what is meant by the term Karen or Miss Anne. I also think it's risky to resort to those kinds of generalizations and those plurifications. It's easy, and it sometimes can be funny, and we can roll our eyes about this, but I think it serves us better to talk about the specific instances, the specific people, and then say, statistically, this has happened a hundred times. And so, we need to figure out what it is about this status that makes this so possible, that makes this woman reach for her phone to call 911. [We need to] talk about that history. But to label that person as a Karen is a gesture that I think is comforting on the one level, but it's a riposte, it's a smacking back at the tennis ball of calling me "Jane Crow." My father grew up in the Deep South, and they used to call Black people Jenny. All Black people were Jenny or Jim. They didn't bother to get your name. And I don't mean to say it's exactly the same thing, it's not the same thing. There's something satisfyingly mean-spirited about doing that from time to time, but I really do want to caution against that generally because the first time around, to do it is a way of highlighting what it is that [they’re] doing, but when it becomes a habit of speech, it worries me. It worries me because then we're all dismissing each other with labels. 

DM: One of the things that I find striking is the parallelism between what you're describing, the move from the singular to the plural that Donald Trump does so easily when he talks about the Chinese virus. And the idea that to call something, someone a Karen—what kind of collectivity do we wish to build, and what is the work that we wish to do? What kind of work are we supposed to do together?  I mean, I agree, the question of calling something out as racist is really important and satisfying. But what is the work after that? 

PW: The work—this disproportionate labor that Black women carry and that Black men carry, that minorities carry, that migrants carry, that South Asians carry, that white people who want to be allies carry and Jews want to carry— it's harder to be coalitional with a white woman actually named Karen. We've already sort of placed the boundary at that point, and we need all the coalitions we can get. Coming together as coalitional work makes that emotional labor somewhat more effective but also less stressful upon any particular group, particularly upon individual bodies, and we've got to come together. We just have to. It's not going to be easy, but I don't see any other option. 

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Coming together in coalitional work makes ... emotional labor ... less stressful upon any particular group.... And we've got to come together. We just have to. It's not going to be easy, but I don't see any other option.' --Patricia Williams" quote="Coming together in coalitional work makes ... emotional labor ... less stressful upon any particular group.... And we've got to come together. We just have to. It's not going to be easy, but I don't see any other option." theme="style2"]

CK: That's such a wonderful and kind of hopeful perfect moment. We should probably end because that's such a perfect moment of wisdom and hope, which I always find in your work and [which] I'm always a little surprised by because you're so good at laying out what's hopeless and then you always have that little moment of remembering that we do have to come together. As always, you're so intellectually generous. This has been wonderful.

DM: It's just really a privilege, I can't tell you. I just was beaming the whole time. I’m just smiling because I just feel so lucky to hear the way you think.

PW: Oh, thank you. Thank you.