A tribute to the work of Patricia Williams

Some of you might have been with us for previous Symposia-last year we came together to honor the work of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and to acknowledge the fortieth anniversary of her joining the Columbia Law faculty as its first tenured female professor. Pat teaches us through personal narrative, the retelling of real life instances of racial violence, and close reading of legal texts how the race-neutral world called forth by the Supreme Court's affirmative action jurisprudence is one in which race becomes a kind of taboo, suppressed in polite company, rendering black people both invisible and available to the probing, curious eye of "neutral" color-blind society.