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.

A friend is wearily discussing her marital woes.

Of her husband, she says, he's the sort of person who'll have a conversation with me, but in his head.

"'It'll turn into a huge imaginary fight,

"'in which I wound, offend, or disappoint him repeatedly.

"'At some random point, he'll reenter real life

"'in order to track me down in the laundry room so that he can

set me straight. On some level, talking about race is a lot like having a conversation with an

abusive spouse. The igniting spark may be small, but the stakes great, the blaze of emotion rendering

each impossible to please, the fight not really about whatever the fight is about.

A war between the real and the imagined, the remembered and the fantasized, the likely and the outrageous.

You're stupid!

Through the radiator pipes of my hotel room comes the voice of an anonymous quarreling neighbor.

I sit in my suite reading a cross-section of popular newspapers and magazines.

A best-selling book claims to have proved anew that blacks and poor people are more stupid than everyone else.

Or, as they put it, genetically inferior to the rest of humanity. Who gave you the right to say anything? Comes the voice again.

I bury myself in my reading. Middle-class Negroes talk too much. Those in poverty are illiterate loudmouths. Real black people struggle silently, mute in the noble choice of their lumpen libertarianism. I pay the bills around here. Whites pay all the taxes. Blacks do all the spending. Whites are sacrificial. Blacks are greedy and grasping.

You can just get out and be homeless if you're so unhappy. Blacks who find it so hard being around whites should just move back to the ghetto, so they can focus their attentions more

handily upon some real problems.

You're a tramp!

Today's black civil rights activists are pimps, cheap pretenders to a moral vision,

...