Patricia J. Williams discusses the Tawana Brawley affair in her book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, published by Harvard University Press. In 1987 Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl who lived in Wappingers Falls, New York, alleged that she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by white racist lawmen after being discovered in a vacant lot with cigarette burns and dog feces on her body. Following public uproar, a grand jury concluded that Ms. Brawley's account was a hoax, and that she had faked the rape to escape punishment for being out late that night. This resulted in uproar of a different sort.

No matter who did it to her—and even if she did it to herself. Her condition was clearly the expression of some crime against her, some tremendous violence, some great violation that challenges comprehension. And it is this much that I grieve about. The rest of the story is lost, or irrelevant in the worst of all possible ways.

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