'VULGARLY OUT OF PLACE'

New York City

Patricia Williams needs to learn to "play the blues and go." I say this because I did not find Williams on Condoleezza Rice either satiric or insightful ["Diary of a Mad Law Professor," Dec. 13]. But it was full of the clichés one expects whenever a black man or woman does not pick up the sword considered "progressive." Rice is a Republican, not a Democrat, and that, apparently, is her great sin. She cannot be judged as what she is; Rice must endure these kinds of confessional essays disguised as commentary, with everything that Williams herself has apparently experienced pushed into the Republican context. In short, are we to assume that Williams has not suffered "the torment of loneliness" she projects onto Rice, that she has not been put in a dream position of sexual magnetism by left-wing white males and that she has not been the one of her kind and her ethnicity in the room with the guys who uphold the "progressive" ideology? The sexual speculations about Rice are perhaps most personally true to Williams and most vulgarly out of place--that is, unless one is not accustomed to seeing and hearing women of success demeaned with the consistency one would expect of a rapper.

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