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Giving a Damn
‘I cannot help but see the bodies of my near ancestors in the current caravans of desperate souls fleeing from place to place, chased by famine, war and toxins. Ideas honed in slavery – of the otherness, the boorishness, the inferiority of thy neighbour – have continued to travel through American society.’
The story of slavery in America is not over. It lives on in how we speak to one another, in how we treat one another, in how our societies are organised. In The Ethical Reader, the legal scholar Patricia Williams finds that when you begin to unpick current debates around immigration, freedom of speech, the culture wars and wall-building, beneath them lies the unexamined history of enslavement in the West. Our ability to dehumanize one another can be traced all the way from the plantation to the US President’s Twitter account.
Williams begins in the American South with Gone With the Wind (still the second most popular book in the USA after the Bible), that nostalgic tale full of the myths of the Southern belle, Southern culture, ‘good food and good manners’. The scene is seductive, from a distance. How nice it is to paper over the obliging slavery at the novel’s core, and enjoy the wisteria-covered plantations, now the venue for weddings.
But Williams’s maternal great-grandmother was a slave, her great-grandfather a slave-owner, and papering over has left us in a world that has never been more segregated, incarcerated or separated from each other. Williams wants to know which ideas brought the richest and most diverse nation on the planet to the brink of resurgent, violent division and what this means for the rest of the world. And she finds that most of those ideas began in slavery.
The story of slavery in America is not over. It lives on in how we speak to one another, in how we treat one another, in how our societies are organised. In The Ethical Reader, the legal scholar Patricia Williams finds that when you begin to unpick current debates around immigration, freedom of speech, the culture wars and wall-building, beneath them lies the unexamined history of enslavement in the West. Our ability to dehumanize one another can be traced all the way from the plantation to the US President’s Twitter account.
Williams begins in the American South with Gone With the Wind (still the second most popular book in the USA after the Bible), that nostalgic tale full of the myths of the Southern belle, Southern culture, ‘good food and good manners’. The scene is seductive, from a distance. How nice it is to paper over the obliging slavery at the novel’s core, and enjoy the wisteria-covered plantations, now the venue for weddings.
But Williams’s maternal great-grandmother was a slave, her great-grandfather a slave-owner, and papering over has left us in a world that has never been more segregated, incarcerated or separated from each other. Williams wants to know which ideas brought the richest and most diverse nation on the planet to the brink of resurgent, violent division and what this means for the rest of the world. And she finds that most of those ideas began in slavery.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryEssays
144 pages, Hardcover
Published June 8, 2021
About the author
Patricia J. Williams
41 books52 followersPatricia J. Williams is an American legal scholar and a proponent of critical race theory.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 23, 2021
Patricia J. Williams’s book’s more an extended essay that takes a form reminiscent of thinking out loud, Williams sets off chains of associations, moving between facts, images and personal anecdotes. This loose structure can sometimes make her central arguments challenging to follow, although the force of her commitment to the ideas she’s exploring is always clearly communicated. She takes as a starting-point the persistent popularity in the U.S. of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind which has circulated and continues to circulate either in its original printed form or its (marginally) less virulent film version since the 1930s - cited as recently as 2014 as the second most popular book in America. Williams, like many African Americans, is the descendent of slaves, a living monument to America’s less palatable past. Except it’s clear to Williams that many of the ways of thinking that justified and perpetuated slavery as a system are still in operation in the present day. Mitchell’s novel is a product of fantasy, an insidious fairy tale, an apologist piece that glosses over the realities of plantation life to offer up images of genteel ladies in ruffled gowns sipping mint juleps, while gentlemen in riding boots fuss over their every desire. In order to swallow fantasies like these it’s necessary to rewrite history, casting, for example, the KKK as guardians and protectors. It’s necessary to focus purely on the white characters and ignore or look past the day-to-day atrocities of slavery, the very real black bodies whose labour and lives were used up to enable the ‘Scarlett O’Haras’ of the South to dress up, preen and flirt – to suspend disbelief and forget that figures like Mammy, seemingly so happy with her lot, represent women who grew up as property, actual people who’d undoubtedly have been raped and brutalised from a very young age. Williams's great-grandfather was her great-grandmother's owner, so she's all too aware of the harsher truths Mitchell's narrative conceals.
Williams’s essay doesn’t examine Mitchell’s work in any detail instead she thinks about what it might represent, and what its extensive readership might tell us about contemporary American society. The ongoing popularity of this novel, the values and attitudes its narrative promotes, can be viewed as a testament to the ability to ‘other’ to accept, on some level, a situation in which “certain classes of human beings are not ‘really’ human, they do not feel pain to the same degree as ‘more ‘civilized’ classes…” A perspective that divides, setting up boundaries, the ‘them versus us’ that feeds into and reinforces the segregation at the heart of American society: the policies that led to children being torn from their families to be shunted into centres for immigrants, abused and often rendered nameless; that sets up walls, sometimes literal, sometimes not; that leads to the exclusion or marginalisation of some groups; and that encourages the sanitisation of history rather than a confrontation and a coming-to-terms with the past, ultimately privileging denial and/or conflict over dialogue. Williams’s work is published here in a new imprint from the Times Literary Supplement, which is intended to encourage debate and provide introductions or overviews to topical subjects. This addition to their list was published in 2021 but written during the last months of the Trump presidency and this can sometimes detract from the immediacy of the discussion, although it’s clear that what Trump stood for is still a very real and present danger in American politics and in its wider society.
Rating: 3.5
Williams’s essay doesn’t examine Mitchell’s work in any detail instead she thinks about what it might represent, and what its extensive readership might tell us about contemporary American society. The ongoing popularity of this novel, the values and attitudes its narrative promotes, can be viewed as a testament to the ability to ‘other’ to accept, on some level, a situation in which “certain classes of human beings are not ‘really’ human, they do not feel pain to the same degree as ‘more ‘civilized’ classes…” A perspective that divides, setting up boundaries, the ‘them versus us’ that feeds into and reinforces the segregation at the heart of American society: the policies that led to children being torn from their families to be shunted into centres for immigrants, abused and often rendered nameless; that sets up walls, sometimes literal, sometimes not; that leads to the exclusion or marginalisation of some groups; and that encourages the sanitisation of history rather than a confrontation and a coming-to-terms with the past, ultimately privileging denial and/or conflict over dialogue. Williams’s work is published here in a new imprint from the Times Literary Supplement, which is intended to encourage debate and provide introductions or overviews to topical subjects. This addition to their list was published in 2021 but written during the last months of the Trump presidency and this can sometimes detract from the immediacy of the discussion, although it’s clear that what Trump stood for is still a very real and present danger in American politics and in its wider society.
Rating: 3.5
December 30, 2021
Patricia Williams is one of those academics and public intellectuals whose work draws in an array of often unlinked questions. I first encountered her work in the mid 1990s with a series of essays where she brought the insights of critical legal studies to public policy and cultural politics, and in doing so encouraged me to look at the law differently (which was helpful given my work at the time with questions of contract and constitutional law). At the time, and in her subsequent 1997 Reith Lectures on the BBC, she grappled with issues of race in the contemporary USA. In this impressive short essay (published as Giving a Damn, not The Ethical Reader) she remains in that field, although less explicitly in a CLS fame.
Here she turns to the contemporary, late 2020 condition of the USA focusing on race reflected through a kind of nostalgia Trump drew on and amplified, in this case where Gone with the Wind provides the motifs and lynch pins for a form of a romanticised, anti-bellum South of honour and dignity – writing out of existence the violence and horrors of slavery. Each chapter opens with a quotation from the novel, highlighting a theme – of nostalgia, of betrayal and so forth – to tease out the contemporary resonances of the notion, its impacts in the USA’s politics of race, articulations in current discourses of white supremacy and the Trumpian model. The image of the past she evokes reminded me of the extreme discomfort I felt in Savannah, GA – with its gorgeous city core and ante-bellum housing that survived the Civil War largely intact and that conceals the brutalities and murderous regimes of oppression that sustained that splendour. Williams critiques that inability to see beyond and more, where she also tears apart the nostalgia for and sanitisation of that world.
In doing so, she casts her net widely to draw in a seemingly disparate set of questions that come together to build a rich, nuanced sense of the contemporary culture and politics of racial oppression, woven through with a deep historical understanding of the presence of the past in the present as well as of the ways that the perimeters of history are being recast to reassert a nostalgia for the fantasy of old South, to assert a mythology of contemporary equality and to anachronistically impose that on the past (as an aside, I still cannot quite get over the Right’s use of the term immigrant to label the enslaved).
Williams crafts elegant prose, in the manner of a classic essayist, but in this case the poetics of her style don’t serve to sanitise but to evoke the brutality US history, both as the past and present, and the fantasy of the past perceived by contemporary white Supremacy. For all that it’s a disturbing exploration of the then and the now, and reminder of the ideological role of fiction where the mythology depicted by a novel obscures a past that continues to shape the now.
It may be a short book, but it packs a punch and merits revisiting. It’s nice to return to favoured analysts and authors and to come away reminded of why they’re favourites.
Here she turns to the contemporary, late 2020 condition of the USA focusing on race reflected through a kind of nostalgia Trump drew on and amplified, in this case where Gone with the Wind provides the motifs and lynch pins for a form of a romanticised, anti-bellum South of honour and dignity – writing out of existence the violence and horrors of slavery. Each chapter opens with a quotation from the novel, highlighting a theme – of nostalgia, of betrayal and so forth – to tease out the contemporary resonances of the notion, its impacts in the USA’s politics of race, articulations in current discourses of white supremacy and the Trumpian model. The image of the past she evokes reminded me of the extreme discomfort I felt in Savannah, GA – with its gorgeous city core and ante-bellum housing that survived the Civil War largely intact and that conceals the brutalities and murderous regimes of oppression that sustained that splendour. Williams critiques that inability to see beyond and more, where she also tears apart the nostalgia for and sanitisation of that world.
In doing so, she casts her net widely to draw in a seemingly disparate set of questions that come together to build a rich, nuanced sense of the contemporary culture and politics of racial oppression, woven through with a deep historical understanding of the presence of the past in the present as well as of the ways that the perimeters of history are being recast to reassert a nostalgia for the fantasy of old South, to assert a mythology of contemporary equality and to anachronistically impose that on the past (as an aside, I still cannot quite get over the Right’s use of the term immigrant to label the enslaved).
Williams crafts elegant prose, in the manner of a classic essayist, but in this case the poetics of her style don’t serve to sanitise but to evoke the brutality US history, both as the past and present, and the fantasy of the past perceived by contemporary white Supremacy. For all that it’s a disturbing exploration of the then and the now, and reminder of the ideological role of fiction where the mythology depicted by a novel obscures a past that continues to shape the now.
It may be a short book, but it packs a punch and merits revisiting. It’s nice to return to favoured analysts and authors and to come away reminded of why they’re favourites.
March 24, 2022
Reading prof. Williams write about how she is no fun and cannot help be perturbed by the history and politics behind things, helps me find words for the discomfort we experience when popular culture takes racism and sexism lightly. I have the permission to be no fun when it comes to micro aggressions, narcissism and gaslighting after making racist or sexist comments. History matters and lingers in your bones. The past is indeed not behind us but “buried in us”. It is important to remember the weight it carries and the weight all of us carry because of it.
February 4, 2022
Through the lens of the beloved book and movie Gone With The Wind, Williams examines the often rose colored glasses through which we view our nation's racist past. These perceptions of our history keep us divided, creating walls that hamper any mutual understanding that is necessary for any meaningful progress. As the struggle for equality continues, these divisive ideas, now able to be transmitted worldwide in an instant, continue to find willing adherents. A short read with a big impact, I highly recommend this book.
April 4, 2026
In terms of analysis and research, this is 5 stars; in terms of length, this is 4 stars because I wanted more.
The fairytale of Southern hospitality and charm is alive and well throughout the United States, with few aware of its history as a rehabilitation tool invented by the Confederacy during the post-Civil War era. Patricia Williams - attorney, scholar, and descendant of enslaved people - lends her expertise to examining the history of American enslavement and disenfranchisement, tracing our ability to dehumanize each other from Louisiana cotton fields straight to the Trump administrations.
Quick, informative read!
The fairytale of Southern hospitality and charm is alive and well throughout the United States, with few aware of its history as a rehabilitation tool invented by the Confederacy during the post-Civil War era. Patricia Williams - attorney, scholar, and descendant of enslaved people - lends her expertise to examining the history of American enslavement and disenfranchisement, tracing our ability to dehumanize each other from Louisiana cotton fields straight to the Trump administrations.
Quick, informative read!
December 10, 2023
I'd never read much nonfiction but the relevance of current issues compels me. For me, who rarely reads nonfiction, this is a short but compact & direct insight into the issues of racism in America - and can relate it to how it happens across the globe. There's so many things to ponder how racial segregation becomes a permanent scar gifted by history, inherited to generations to come. Understanding it becomes a mystery, like a language forgotten.
"Walls regulate not only which bodies may cross a border, they regulate who can see beyond and who can see within." - Patricia J. Williams.
"Walls regulate not only which bodies may cross a border, they regulate who can see beyond and who can see within." - Patricia J. Williams.
June 4, 2023
I enjoyed reading this. Helped me understand the U.S. better, and I'd say the world actually. Will definitely go back to it again and again. I particularly liked the interesting questions it raises and addresses; like "Does a masterful writerly form trump despicable content? Does persuasive romance mask outright propaganda?" I also love that uses the literary device of allusion in the most brilliant way.
May 4, 2021
This book connect the past with the present along racial divides. It demonstrates the old style thinking. It also suggest that the attitudes are generated by slavery. It marks specific facts on how people nowadays do not know how to communicate, be neighborly and interact as equals.
January 20, 2022
another stunner from Patricia J. Williams
February 3, 2022
Thought provoking and hard hitting.
December 17, 2024
I would not say that this is more enlightening than her previous academic work, but it is certainly more accessible.
February 27, 2025
Very good but she didn’t have to use all that advanced vocab. This was intended for a very specific audience
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews