to speak as black, female, and commercial lawyer has rendered me simultaneously universal, trendy, and marginal.

In the law, rights are islands of empowerment. . . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.

We humans have always needed rituals to draw like curtains over the chasms of the unknown. Without them we go mad, I think.

Within the world of TV land, into which American life has been reduced as well as reproduced, the phenomenon of the talk show has emerged as a genre located somewhere on the spectrum between coffee klatch and town meeting, or perhaps between the psychiatrist's couch and the crowd scene at a bad accident.

witch-hunting misogyny is fiercely recurrent in this nation, even if its forms vary with the ages.

the very notion of blindness about color constitutes an ideological confusion at best, and denial at its very worst.