kaya naomi williams
Embedded Files
I am currently working on a three-part piece in which I think with ethnography, history, and literature to trace and unsettle the relationship between civil rights law and white power. Part 1 (White/Atticus) takes a comment from a civil rights lawyer about Atticus Finch and follows it deep down a rabbit hole in an attempt to understand Americans’ faith in the law and in good white men. Part 2 (Power) follows the real historical case of the Scottsboro Boys to show how little legal battles over black civil rights care about black life. For this forum I plan to preview and think through the final and most unhinged part of this triptych. Part 3 (Suit) is interested in the aesthetic and performative work of off-white folks (white folks who are just a bit ‘off’). Thinking with the same lawyer who invoked Atticus Finch, I turn here to the rest of my conversation with that lawyer about his self-professed “weird psychological makeup.” Through this, I hope to productively engage with the social and political potential of some of the disturbing, unhinged, unsettling, or mad behaviors of ‘some white folks.’
Kaya Naomi Williams is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College. Williams' work seeks to unsettle the seeming intractability of incarceration as a peculiarly American problem. Williams' current research projects engage ethnographically with efforts by policymakers, lawyers, organizers, and other city residents to shape the future of New Orleans’ municipal jail. In this research Williams is not interested in the practice or experience of confinement itself but in the day-to-day work of people seeking to change the city’s carceral practices. Williams' current book project focuses on the political and legal battles surrounding a proposed “mental health jail” in the city of New Orleans. Tentatively titled “Our Bridge to Nowhere,” the book tracks the material construction of New Orleans’ jail complex post-Katrina alongside the cultural and historical production of projects of criminal justice reform more generally, paying particular attention to the arenas of law, policy, and community organizing. Williams' next research project will be a multi-sited study focused on the rise of progressive prosecution in the United States.
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