Seeing a colour-blind future

by Patricia J. Williams

In these five pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where color doesn't matter - where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the great divide between "the poles of other people's imagination and the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides," and discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving racism. Williams offers us a new starting point - "a sensible and sustained consideration" - from which we might begin to deal honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices. Some forty years ago, James Baldwin informed White America: "We know more about you than you know about us." Today, Patricia Williams sets out to repair this failing.