Thread by @AlsoACarpenter

"I grew up living in the past. The future, some versions of which had only the sheerest possibility of happening was treated with the respect of the already happened, seen through the expansively prismatic lenses of what had already happened. 1/

2/ "Thus, when I decided to go to law school, my mother told me that the Millers were lawyers so you have it in your blood. Now the Millers were the slaveholders of my maternal grandmother's clan.

3/ "The Millers were also my great-great-grandparents and great-aunts and who knows what else. My great-great-grandfather Austin Miller, a thirty-five-year old lawyer, bought my eleven year old great-great-grandmother, Sophic, and her parents (being 'family Negroes,' the previous

4/ "owner sold them as a matched set). By the time she was twelve, Austin Miller had made Sophie mother of a child, my great grandmother Mary. He did so, according to family lore, out of his desire to have a family.

5/ "Not, of course, a family with my great-great-grandmother, but with a wealthy white widow whom he in fact married shortly thereafter. He wanted to practice his sexual talents on my great-great-grandmother. In the bargain, Sophie bore Mary, who was taken away from her and

6/ "raised in the Big House as a house servant, an attendant to his wife, Mary (after whom Sophie's Mary, my great grandmother, had been named), and to his legitimated white children.

7/ "In ironic, perverse obeisance to the rationalizations of this bitter ancestral mix, the image of this self-centered child molester became the fuel for my survival during the dispossessed limbo of my years at Harvard, the *Bakke* years, the years when everyone was running

8/ "around telling black people that they were very happy to have us there, but after all they did have to lower the standards and readjust the grading system, but Harvard could *afford* to do that because Harvard was Harvard. And it worked I got through law school, quietly

9/ "driven by the false idol of the white-man-within-me, and I absorbed a whole lot of the knowledge and the values which had enslaved me and my foremothers."

~Patricia J Williams, "Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights"

10/10 If you can get your hands on this essay, definitely read it. It's powerful, heartbreaking, illuminating, and intellectually profound and complicated, yet reads like easy prose.