OPEN HOUSE

Legal scholar and Nation columnist Williams offers a stimulating mix of reminiscences and finely honed arguments as she tries to answer the question a friend once posed: Who is the one person she could never be?

Like most of her writings (Seeing a Color-Blind Future, 1998, etc.), this is fundamentally a work of serious intent, even though the illustrative anecdotes are often charming as well as apt. Employing the beguiling image of an open house whose rooms she associates with friends, family, and memories, Williams grapples in “The Boudoir,” “The Kitchen,” “The Outhouse,” and other essays with big questions—race, identity, burgeoning technology—while setting them firmly in the context of her own life. The story of how Great-aunt Mary passed for white when she married a Boston lawyer, for example, seems to Williams an example of how racial and cultural mixing, “nonconformist, embarrassing, and once illegal,” are nonetheless inherent aspects of American society. Her experience learning to play the piano in her 50s occasions recollections of the hostile reaction she received when asked to give the Reith Lectures on the BBC. Described as a militant black feminist who hates whites, she thinks such characterizations of black women are still very common on campus and in the law. Williams ponders the importance of O, the Oprah Magazine (maybe “romantic humanitarianism isn’t such a bad thing”); delineates her reactions to her son’s bout with Kawasaki disease (“I feel it as kind of permanent inner snowstorm”); and elucidates the significance of the names African-Americans gave their children after slavery was abolished, suggesting that some were intended to disguise their origins so that former owners could not find them. In school and in the wider world, she finds, African-Americans constantly battle stereotypes that lead whites to view them as impostors—or the help.

Tough and challenging ideas couched in disarming prose.