Read this:

Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
 

Now, read this:

"Can I touch it?"

Let me explain. A white woman, a grown white woman, who does not know me, came up to me at Home Video and asked (to no one, apparently, as I heard her voice before I saw her face) if she could touch my hair. This woman, who has never seen me before in her life, who isn't so alienated or ignorant that she's never seen any Black people, as evidenced by her compulsive divulgence of the details of her sexual orientation toward and concomitant marriage to an African-American man (who won't wear his hair like mine so she asks how I got it done), who, in her squirrelly effervescence, speaks no evil, asked if she could touch my hair.

Perhaps, in the better world you may imagine just beyond the corridors of your liberal postmodern fantasy; perhaps, in the dystopic underworld that lies beneath the façade of your ironic personal psychological armor; perhaps, in the world of reconcilable differences, dynamic equilibrium, Cartesian universality and the harmonic sequence that chains your hopes and dreams to the equally plausible reality of someone else's misfortune; perhaps, in a world like that, I would be able to go up to middle-aged white women minding their own business and tell them my partner is a white male and that he just won't be white the way I want him to be, and I would spur this enlightening but casual dialogue by asking this unfamiliar white woman's back: "Can I touch it?"

Can I touch it.

Because I am a college-educated, middle-class, academically-inclined, self-conscious, well-read critic of racism who is about to have an accredited degree in the discipline that produces my state of consciousness, I can tell you that the hypothetical I have just proposed is constitutionally impossible; it is unconstitutional. But the real one, the one where an above-average intelligence, middle-class, middle-aged, legally-interracially-married, American-accented resident of my same state and locality, probably my area code, came up to me and violated every boundary that a situated theory of subjectivity delimited in the aforementioned situation, that one, that scenario, has already happened. From my perspective, however mediated by this experience, it had always already happened. And the one lesson I learned, the one opportunity this episode afforded me to grow as a person and heal the world of the wounds that divide us, was a profound recognition of the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time. In fact, it's happened to me plenty of times, only in different degrees and from different angles. The only observation of note that I can make about these past occurrences, and future ones in my now-diachronic purview, is that if that voice had come from a child, I would have felt a great swell of love and despair for that child that someday they might become that woman; would that I had known it was too late. To paraphrase Kate Bornstein, to paraphrase the Bible, out of context, Corinthians 1: "When I was a child, I thought, acted, spake as a child; when I became a man I put away childish things."

Tell me I've made a category mistake. Tell me there are bigger fish to fry. Tell me I've contradicted myself. Tell me something about my argument.

And if I cry, it's not because of anything you've told me. And if you cry, it's not because of anything I've told you.