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.

the solution to racism lies in our ability to see its ubiquity but not to concede its inevitability. It lies in the collective and institutional power to make change, at least as much as with the individual will to change. It also lies in the absolute moral imperative to break the childish, deadly circularity of centuries of blindness to the shimmering brilliance of our common, ordinary humanity.

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

Hilary Clinton's great sin was that she left the nicely wallpapered domestic sphere with a slam of the door, took up public life on her own, leaving big feminist footprints all over the place, and without so much as an apology.

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