This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Genealogy of Race, given by Patricia Williams, was originally broadcast in 1997.

This is the year when Europe rededicates itself to the eradication of racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism.

I have presented these lectures in the spirit of that

dedication, and with the hope that the productive controversy, my words undoubtedly will have stirred,

will continue. We'll continue around dinner tables, will continue as little shifts of empathy,

will occasion some degree of thought-provoking anxiety, and yet remain civil.

My assumption in these lectures has been that my audience is one of good people of all races and ages, good people of goodwill.

And my subject has been the small aggressions of unconscious racism, rather than the big-booted oppressions of bigotry in its most extreme manifestations.

I have chosen to speak of these quieter forms of racism because I think that the eradication of prejudice, the reconciling of tensions across racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious lines,

depends upon eradicating the little blindnesses, not just the big.

It depends upon eradicating the troublesome, attitudinal divide between the paralyzing anxiety

of well-meaning white guilt

and the smoldering unhappiness

of blacks who dare not speak their minds.

It is not an easy project, this.

Perhaps as an outsider,

it will have been easier for me to raise these issues. If so,

I hope my thoughts will serve as a bridge to the more intimate contexts of the specific

struggles you face in Britain. To summarize some of the points that I think are most important,

race is not a cipher for poverty.

Racism is no doubt immensely complicated by the privations of poverty,

...