Where Is Your Body?: And Other Essays on Race, Gender, and the Law

A Japanese American law professor who asks trenchant questions about gender and ethnic identity, Mari Matsuda injects messy reality into complex legal and social doctrines. The title essay in this rousing, incisive collection celebrates the American civil rights protesters who challenged segregation. Among those who laid their bodies on the line, Matsuda hails an earnest group of middle-class black schoolteachers who risked jail by registering to vote. "They are old women now," she writes, "full of peace, I imagine, knowing as they do that they stood tall in a moment of history making." Initially cast as lectures, papers, and speeches, her words have poetic lilt and immediacy. She relishes unpopular, sometimes contradictory positions, wading into the fray on political correctness (she applauds it) and racist speech (she's willing to ban it). Now, says Matsuda, "it is time to hear our own voices, to silence the ones that say 'stop acting your color.' This is the privilege we earned from generations before who made wise choices. They survived so we could flourish, so we could speak up, act up, do right, with our colors flying."