Part I, Excluding Voices, A Necklace of Thoughts on the Ideology of Style, Chapter 3, The Death of the Profane Summary and Analysis

In the mid-80s small businesses in New York City start to install buzzers that would let people in stores only with permission of the attendant at the store at the time. They are rationalized as a method of protecting stores from crime, although Williams thinks that it is a means of discrimination. In fact, one day she is excluded from Benetton's by a white attendant who still has a number of white women in the store.

Williams is enraged and feels deeply humiliated. She writes the story up for a law review and then gives the paper at a symposium. She uses her story...