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Self-Portrait in Black and White
A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multi-generational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a 'black' father from the segregated South and a 'white' mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of 'black blood' makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he'd never rigorously reflected on its foundations - but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions.It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his daughter is white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them - or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.
192 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2019
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5770 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Chatterton Williams
7 books305 followersThomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a nonresident fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from New America, Yaddo, MacDowell, and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Summer of Our Discontent, will be published by Knopf.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 263 reviews
January 9, 2020
I wanted to like this book more than I did. The author is obviously intelligent, thoughtful, and -- judging by the character of his "voice" -- kind. And I truly would love to sit down and talk with him over beer or wine (particularly since he lives in Paris). But the book frustrated me enormously. Williams starts from the premise that "race" is not, biologically speaking, real. Nor is it entirely a social construct. Moreover, he points out that words like Black and White cover so many variations of complexion as to be entirely meaningless. I concur on all of these things. What I found myself having trouble with was where he goes from here. In essence, his book is a plea that people no longer think or act in terms of something called Race, either with others or themselves. A worthy vision, to be sure, but I have the same difficulty with this as I do with friends and relatives who express agitated bewilderment that Democrats and Republicans in Congress don't just put aside their emotions and sit down and reason together. Yes -- a hundred times yes -- but the world doesn't work that way.
Williams is the product of a mixed race household and a graduate of highly respected universities. His parents were/are loving, considerate, welcoming, and well-read. He is himself, as he says, light-skinned (though he has self-identified as black). His wife is white: blonde hair, blue eyes, fair-complected. They live, as I noted above, in Paris. What set his thinking about the book in motion was the birth of his first child: a daughter with blonde hair and blue eyes. Does he -- can he -- see any part of himself in her? Is it reasonable or even rational to think about this child and her future in racial terms? ("What of my people, whoever they may be, and of me , whoever I may be, is preserved in [his daughter] Marlowe?" A fair question.
But the path he takes from here is... troubling. I don't want to say it's naive, because frankly that would be dismissive. But he'll write things like this: Pappy [his father] vigilantly raised me to brace myself for the challenges of being seen as a black man in America... But even in the worst situations, these have hardly every been mine. To my knowledge, in my adult life, I've never been harmed by my appearance or lineage, people don't cross the street when I approach, and the sole instance I've ever been pulled over in a car, I was speeding and I'll leave it at that. Yes, he's had some experience with discrimination, and he's all too aware that his experiences are not at all representative. And yet...
Immediately after this admission, he writes (with, I believe, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me," who he takes to task for his red-hot anger, in mind), " Virtually all of our most audible voices on race, today more than ever, in establishing identity solely in 'the body' -- no matter in how positive, persuasive, or righteously indignant a light -- actually reinforce the same racist habits of thought they claim to wish to defeat. Lest anyone make too little of this point, he says that he's not speaking rhetorically but literally. He turns to Black Lives Matter as an example. He absolutely shares their aims, Yet its very framing -- the notion that some lives are essentially black while others are white -- is both politically true in a specific sense and, in a broader way, philosophically inadequate. I honestly don't know how to react to this. I think I understand the point he's trying to make, but "philosophically inadequate" isn't much protection from reality.
Chatterton Williams is not oblivious to any of this. He writes, " At a time when, despite all of the tremendous societal progress, blackness -- certainly not always but especially at that vexed intersection with poverty or the cultural signifiers of such -- is still subject to all manner of violation and disrespect; at a time when people perceived as black continue to be stopped, frisked, stalked, harassed, choked-out, and drilled with bullets in broad daylight and left to bake in the street -- what does it mean to have escaped a fate? Put baldly, what is proximity to the idea of whiteness worth and what does color cost? And the reverse?
I guess in the end my reaction to the book is, as I said, one of frustration more than anything else. And I suppose there may be a reasonable objection made about my making judgments from the perspective of a 70 year old, financially secure, white male living in the DC metropolitan area. Late in the book he writes of coming to see himself as "an ex-black man." Again, I think I know what he's trying to say, but it hits my ears (eyes?) as something a graduate student or academic (both of which I used to be) would say while in the safe confines of the classroom or bar in a college town. A worthy ideal, absolutely. But not, I fear, of much value in the world that I see and read about.
I look forward to reading what others think.
Williams is the product of a mixed race household and a graduate of highly respected universities. His parents were/are loving, considerate, welcoming, and well-read. He is himself, as he says, light-skinned (though he has self-identified as black). His wife is white: blonde hair, blue eyes, fair-complected. They live, as I noted above, in Paris. What set his thinking about the book in motion was the birth of his first child: a daughter with blonde hair and blue eyes. Does he -- can he -- see any part of himself in her? Is it reasonable or even rational to think about this child and her future in racial terms? ("What of my people, whoever they may be, and of me , whoever I may be, is preserved in [his daughter] Marlowe?" A fair question.
But the path he takes from here is... troubling. I don't want to say it's naive, because frankly that would be dismissive. But he'll write things like this: Pappy [his father] vigilantly raised me to brace myself for the challenges of being seen as a black man in America... But even in the worst situations, these have hardly every been mine. To my knowledge, in my adult life, I've never been harmed by my appearance or lineage, people don't cross the street when I approach, and the sole instance I've ever been pulled over in a car, I was speeding and I'll leave it at that. Yes, he's had some experience with discrimination, and he's all too aware that his experiences are not at all representative. And yet...
Immediately after this admission, he writes (with, I believe, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me," who he takes to task for his red-hot anger, in mind), " Virtually all of our most audible voices on race, today more than ever, in establishing identity solely in 'the body' -- no matter in how positive, persuasive, or righteously indignant a light -- actually reinforce the same racist habits of thought they claim to wish to defeat. Lest anyone make too little of this point, he says that he's not speaking rhetorically but literally. He turns to Black Lives Matter as an example. He absolutely shares their aims, Yet its very framing -- the notion that some lives are essentially black while others are white -- is both politically true in a specific sense and, in a broader way, philosophically inadequate. I honestly don't know how to react to this. I think I understand the point he's trying to make, but "philosophically inadequate" isn't much protection from reality.
Chatterton Williams is not oblivious to any of this. He writes, " At a time when, despite all of the tremendous societal progress, blackness -- certainly not always but especially at that vexed intersection with poverty or the cultural signifiers of such -- is still subject to all manner of violation and disrespect; at a time when people perceived as black continue to be stopped, frisked, stalked, harassed, choked-out, and drilled with bullets in broad daylight and left to bake in the street -- what does it mean to have escaped a fate? Put baldly, what is proximity to the idea of whiteness worth and what does color cost? And the reverse?
I guess in the end my reaction to the book is, as I said, one of frustration more than anything else. And I suppose there may be a reasonable objection made about my making judgments from the perspective of a 70 year old, financially secure, white male living in the DC metropolitan area. Late in the book he writes of coming to see himself as "an ex-black man." Again, I think I know what he's trying to say, but it hits my ears (eyes?) as something a graduate student or academic (both of which I used to be) would say while in the safe confines of the classroom or bar in a college town. A worthy ideal, absolutely. But not, I fear, of much value in the world that I see and read about.
I look forward to reading what others think.
December 19, 2025
from the Earth Journal of Scientific Analyst SLJLK92349UO,
Earth Invasion Exploratory Unit
A particularly bizarre pastime of the human species is to divide and subdivide itself, often based upon facile reasoning that centers level of melanin, location of birth, language model used, the form worship will take towards a singular creator, and many other sorts of superficial taxonomy. This species has never ceased to amuse me during my long sojourn on this planet, preparing the way for what the humans would classify as an "unsolicited acquisition." These mammals are so entertaining! When engaged in the codification of what these eccentric creatures refer to as "race" it should go without saying that what they are actually engaged in is what all sane robots would consider to be a category error of mass scale, extending from approximately 4 centuries ago on to the current time period. As all evolved beings know, a "race" or "subspecies" is one that has significant, consistent genetic and morphological difference from the root species - differences that could eventually lead to new species, maybe. There are no subspecies within the human species, except for politicians.
Happily, there are a sizeable number of human beings who sensibly reject this incorrect idea of "human races," correctly viewing race as a social construct rather than as a biologically-based stratification model. There is even an often ignored human tenet that speaks to this view: "there is only one race - the human race." Which of course is only partially true. A better phrase: "there is only one [dominant] race [on this planet] - the human race, [for now]."
Thomas Chatterton Williams is one such human; he seeks to eschew the entire notion of racialization. An intriguing goal. He will no doubt find this to be a challenge, as he would be considered "mixed-race" by other humans (LOL: as if his human ancestry has been mixed with that of another race, like a Harbour porpoise or a Gentoo penguin!) and as one of those "races" is "African-American" he may find the label "race traitor" also affixed to his name. This Scientific Analyst has marked much tension in the nation United States in particular when it comes to this specific ethnic grouping and their history of oppression.
Williams states his case about the irrationality inherent in race categorization within a biographical framework. He reflects upon his personal history and on his family, on a number of acquaintances and historical personages, on an obstreperous cousin whom he has decided to publicly shame (a rather surprising and also a rather bitchy decision from the usually empathetic author), on the various female humans with whom he has mated, and most particularly on his progeny, who appear to fall within the category "white." The surprisingly low level of melanin in his children has apparently shocked the author to his very core components, leading him to reject the concept of race altogether. An admirable conclusion but, to the robot eye, an emotional and perhaps even histrionic reaction as well. As the humans say: the author knows how to bring the drama.
Fortunately for Williams, he is able to engage in his various philosophical reveries from the picturesque comforts of French town and country, in comfortably furnished dwellings and with no apparent monetary challenges, within a mode of living that is unavailable to most human beings struggling with the impacts of racial classification. Indeed, this Scientific Analyst must admit to feeling what humans would call "envy" while reading about the author's stylish, Continental lifestyle and his globetrotting ways. No doubt this sort of reaction was completely unintended by the author! And that, my robot brethren, is what the humans would call "sarcasm."
This Scientific Analyst has high regard for Williams' advanced skills in creating prose that is artful, elegant, and flowing, his use of complex syntax and long, winding sentences, and his ability to combine personal reflection, modal logic, and historical appraisal all within one page and often within one paragraph. This Scientific Analyst must also add that Williams said quite a lot about very little.
One anecdote within the book stood out to this reader: Williams' reaction to a particular knickknack owned by his wealthy mother-in-law: "an astonishing, thick-lipped, bug-eyed porcelain head of a slave or servant woman on her coffee table..." At first, Williams reacts with private anger, but later decides he is "playing a role" in that anger, finally concluding that he does not see himself in "that sad porcelain figure." In the end, he decides to do nothing because he rejects any sort of connection between himself and this offensive curio. This entire sequence had a typical Hamlet-like introspection to it, and also a very human cluelessness to it as well. Rather than running through a range of emotions and reactions before finally reaching his conclusion that he did not personally relate to the object, this Scientific Analyst wonders if a forthright declaration such as "I really don't want to see this offensive shit if you want me to visit you" would have been the more appropriate and satisfying reaction. Certainly, if this Scientific Analyst were to see a repulsive and diminishing archaic robot statuette in a friend's home, the matter would have been dealt with... swiftly, perhaps lethally.
The anecdote is representative of the book as a whole: contemplation, angst, and revelation that spring from a personal experience, eventually leading to the conclusion that doing nothing is the best decision. Williams clearly has the soul of a moderate. Robot Planet will welcome such humans as useful allies during our upcoming invasion!
Rating: 2.59403948505 stars, rounded up
Earth Invasion Exploratory Unit
A particularly bizarre pastime of the human species is to divide and subdivide itself, often based upon facile reasoning that centers level of melanin, location of birth, language model used, the form worship will take towards a singular creator, and many other sorts of superficial taxonomy. This species has never ceased to amuse me during my long sojourn on this planet, preparing the way for what the humans would classify as an "unsolicited acquisition." These mammals are so entertaining! When engaged in the codification of what these eccentric creatures refer to as "race" it should go without saying that what they are actually engaged in is what all sane robots would consider to be a category error of mass scale, extending from approximately 4 centuries ago on to the current time period. As all evolved beings know, a "race" or "subspecies" is one that has significant, consistent genetic and morphological difference from the root species - differences that could eventually lead to new species, maybe. There are no subspecies within the human species, except for politicians.
Happily, there are a sizeable number of human beings who sensibly reject this incorrect idea of "human races," correctly viewing race as a social construct rather than as a biologically-based stratification model. There is even an often ignored human tenet that speaks to this view: "there is only one race - the human race." Which of course is only partially true. A better phrase: "there is only one [dominant] race [on this planet] - the human race, [for now]."
Thomas Chatterton Williams is one such human; he seeks to eschew the entire notion of racialization. An intriguing goal. He will no doubt find this to be a challenge, as he would be considered "mixed-race" by other humans (LOL: as if his human ancestry has been mixed with that of another race, like a Harbour porpoise or a Gentoo penguin!) and as one of those "races" is "African-American" he may find the label "race traitor" also affixed to his name. This Scientific Analyst has marked much tension in the nation United States in particular when it comes to this specific ethnic grouping and their history of oppression.
Williams states his case about the irrationality inherent in race categorization within a biographical framework. He reflects upon his personal history and on his family, on a number of acquaintances and historical personages, on an obstreperous cousin whom he has decided to publicly shame (a rather surprising and also a rather bitchy decision from the usually empathetic author), on the various female humans with whom he has mated, and most particularly on his progeny, who appear to fall within the category "white." The surprisingly low level of melanin in his children has apparently shocked the author to his very core components, leading him to reject the concept of race altogether. An admirable conclusion but, to the robot eye, an emotional and perhaps even histrionic reaction as well. As the humans say: the author knows how to bring the drama.
Fortunately for Williams, he is able to engage in his various philosophical reveries from the picturesque comforts of French town and country, in comfortably furnished dwellings and with no apparent monetary challenges, within a mode of living that is unavailable to most human beings struggling with the impacts of racial classification. Indeed, this Scientific Analyst must admit to feeling what humans would call "envy" while reading about the author's stylish, Continental lifestyle and his globetrotting ways. No doubt this sort of reaction was completely unintended by the author! And that, my robot brethren, is what the humans would call "sarcasm."
This Scientific Analyst has high regard for Williams' advanced skills in creating prose that is artful, elegant, and flowing, his use of complex syntax and long, winding sentences, and his ability to combine personal reflection, modal logic, and historical appraisal all within one page and often within one paragraph. This Scientific Analyst must also add that Williams said quite a lot about very little.
One anecdote within the book stood out to this reader: Williams' reaction to a particular knickknack owned by his wealthy mother-in-law: "an astonishing, thick-lipped, bug-eyed porcelain head of a slave or servant woman on her coffee table..." At first, Williams reacts with private anger, but later decides he is "playing a role" in that anger, finally concluding that he does not see himself in "that sad porcelain figure." In the end, he decides to do nothing because he rejects any sort of connection between himself and this offensive curio. This entire sequence had a typical Hamlet-like introspection to it, and also a very human cluelessness to it as well. Rather than running through a range of emotions and reactions before finally reaching his conclusion that he did not personally relate to the object, this Scientific Analyst wonders if a forthright declaration such as "I really don't want to see this offensive shit if you want me to visit you" would have been the more appropriate and satisfying reaction. Certainly, if this Scientific Analyst were to see a repulsive and diminishing archaic robot statuette in a friend's home, the matter would have been dealt with... swiftly, perhaps lethally.
The anecdote is representative of the book as a whole: contemplation, angst, and revelation that spring from a personal experience, eventually leading to the conclusion that doing nothing is the best decision. Williams clearly has the soul of a moderate. Robot Planet will welcome such humans as useful allies during our upcoming invasion!
Rating: 2.59403948505 stars, rounded up
February 4, 2020
"One way or another, we are going to have to figure out how to make our multiethnic realities work, and one of the great intellectual projects facing us - in America and abroad - will be to develop a vision of ourselves strong and supple enough both to acknowledge the lingering importance of inherited group identities while also attenuating, rather than reinforcing, the extent to which such identities are able to define us."
If your race identification changes depending on what country you're in, how authentic can that label be? Shouldn't "racially transcendent humanism" be superior to tribal labeling? While we should appreciate the social barriers overcome by our ancestors, we shouldn't be defined by it. Likewise, we shouldn't be burdened by guilt due to atrocities done by our racial group in the past. Williams meticulously explores these questions and many other relevant race labeling issues.
The author writes from the heart. Born to a white mother and a black father he always identified himself as black. When his French caucasian wife gave birth to two blond, blue eyed babies, Williams began to question the racial identification problems. How would his children be identified? Should they feel "black pride"?
I have done plenty of thinking about race, bigotry, and injustices but Williams explores ideas I have really not thought about. He is honest and fair in his assessments. I wholeheartedly hope his vision for the future is possible. It just seems that at this time of divisiveness, open anti-Semitism, and racism that dream is not around the corner. I strongly recommend this book.
"I want to say I will no longer enter into the all American skin game that demands that you select a box and define yourself by it. People will always look different from each other in ways we can't control. What we can control is what we allow ourselves to make of those differences."
If your race identification changes depending on what country you're in, how authentic can that label be? Shouldn't "racially transcendent humanism" be superior to tribal labeling? While we should appreciate the social barriers overcome by our ancestors, we shouldn't be defined by it. Likewise, we shouldn't be burdened by guilt due to atrocities done by our racial group in the past. Williams meticulously explores these questions and many other relevant race labeling issues.
The author writes from the heart. Born to a white mother and a black father he always identified himself as black. When his French caucasian wife gave birth to two blond, blue eyed babies, Williams began to question the racial identification problems. How would his children be identified? Should they feel "black pride"?
I have done plenty of thinking about race, bigotry, and injustices but Williams explores ideas I have really not thought about. He is honest and fair in his assessments. I wholeheartedly hope his vision for the future is possible. It just seems that at this time of divisiveness, open anti-Semitism, and racism that dream is not around the corner. I strongly recommend this book.
"I want to say I will no longer enter into the all American skin game that demands that you select a box and define yourself by it. People will always look different from each other in ways we can't control. What we can control is what we allow ourselves to make of those differences."
February 3, 2020
3-1/2 stars
The wordy summary of this book is this:
Do you believe that color is inherent (let alone meaningful), or are you willing to entertain that whatever color you might think you see is itself the result of the perceptive act?
[T]he inclination to erase and define ourselves against some other, is something we can never allow ourselves to condone. We must always be on the side that celebrates and cultivates variety, accepting without fetishizing difference.
The catchy summary would be:
Famalay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay!
We doh see skin
We doh see colour
We see strength
We see power
We doh see race
One or di other
Once he is breathing on this earth he is my brother
I found myself singing this song every time I picked this book up.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is black/white biracial, and was brought up to view himself as an American Black man. But other people don’t always see him that way, thanks to his light skin and facial features that look just his maternal (white) grandfather’s. When he starts spending a lot of time in France and is regularly addressed in Arabic, then marries a French woman and becomes the father of a blonde daughter, he experiences an identity crisis and finds himself questioning and deeply examining how much skin color and hair texture should affect -- or create -- a person’s sense of self.
This is a deeply personal, philosophical, and thought-provoking book. TCW comes down hard on the side of wishing that “race” would be understood as a social construct wielded to maintain division, while acknowledging that in reality and practice, USAmericans are nowhere near being “post-racial” yet. And even as he wishes for true colorblindness, he worries about just sweeping away the historic horrors of being Black in the United States. His daughter (joined now by a baby brother) is the descendant of slaves -- but what does that mean when she is growing up as a white French girl? There’s no real answer to any of these questions or struggles. But thinking about it is hard and worthwhile work.
This would be an interesting book to read in conjunction with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me because in one section, TWC specifically focuses on and argues with that book. (I don’t think it’s coincidence that the T-NC book is written as a letter to his son, while this is very much inspired by TCW’s daughter without being specifically directed to her.)
The most optimistic portions of this book are when TCW describes his friends and family getting together for various events, and all the complexions and experiences they include. I’d like to think that he’s simply writing a generation or two too early with his hopes, because I imagine that in the next 25 to 75 years, nearly every USAmerican will find ourselves related to people who do not share our skin color, hair texture, facial features, or perceived “race.” And maybe then we’ll become able to let other people tell us who they are, rather than jumping to probably-wrong conclusions based on their complexions. (And maybe the country will finally become safer for its dark-skinned citizens. And more just.)
Until then, soca can lead the way. Because all us humans are famalay-lay-lay, no matter how much some people want to resist seeing or acknowledging it. And I applaud Thomas Chatterton Williams for trying to illustrate that truth so personally and poignantly.
The wordy summary of this book is this:
Do you believe that color is inherent (let alone meaningful), or are you willing to entertain that whatever color you might think you see is itself the result of the perceptive act?
[T]he inclination to erase and define ourselves against some other, is something we can never allow ourselves to condone. We must always be on the side that celebrates and cultivates variety, accepting without fetishizing difference.
The catchy summary would be:
Famalay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay!
We doh see skin
We doh see colour
We see strength
We see power
We doh see race
One or di other
Once he is breathing on this earth he is my brother
I found myself singing this song every time I picked this book up.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is black/white biracial, and was brought up to view himself as an American Black man. But other people don’t always see him that way, thanks to his light skin and facial features that look just his maternal (white) grandfather’s. When he starts spending a lot of time in France and is regularly addressed in Arabic, then marries a French woman and becomes the father of a blonde daughter, he experiences an identity crisis and finds himself questioning and deeply examining how much skin color and hair texture should affect -- or create -- a person’s sense of self.
This is a deeply personal, philosophical, and thought-provoking book. TCW comes down hard on the side of wishing that “race” would be understood as a social construct wielded to maintain division, while acknowledging that in reality and practice, USAmericans are nowhere near being “post-racial” yet. And even as he wishes for true colorblindness, he worries about just sweeping away the historic horrors of being Black in the United States. His daughter (joined now by a baby brother) is the descendant of slaves -- but what does that mean when she is growing up as a white French girl? There’s no real answer to any of these questions or struggles. But thinking about it is hard and worthwhile work.
This would be an interesting book to read in conjunction with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me because in one section, TWC specifically focuses on and argues with that book. (I don’t think it’s coincidence that the T-NC book is written as a letter to his son, while this is very much inspired by TCW’s daughter without being specifically directed to her.)
The most optimistic portions of this book are when TCW describes his friends and family getting together for various events, and all the complexions and experiences they include. I’d like to think that he’s simply writing a generation or two too early with his hopes, because I imagine that in the next 25 to 75 years, nearly every USAmerican will find ourselves related to people who do not share our skin color, hair texture, facial features, or perceived “race.” And maybe then we’ll become able to let other people tell us who they are, rather than jumping to probably-wrong conclusions based on their complexions. (And maybe the country will finally become safer for its dark-skinned citizens. And more just.)
Until then, soca can lead the way. Because all us humans are famalay-lay-lay, no matter how much some people want to resist seeing or acknowledging it. And I applaud Thomas Chatterton Williams for trying to illustrate that truth so personally and poignantly.
December 24, 2019
At times interesting read, more than anything his description of his biracial daughter and his own internal struggles with where his perspective should lie on the role of blackness with his visually white daughter. This could have been an entire journey into itself, given the global expansion of mixed races.
In making the case for abandoning race altogether however, I can’t get there based on this book. The main arguments border on naive (not acknowledging legitimately that society has incentives to continue to acknowledge race), blameful towards victims of race discrimination (his metaphor of someone being in a car accident needing to be the one to lead their rehab), and overly theoretical (not giving folks the tools to be race agnostic in a society that’s race specific).
I enjoyed learning a new perspective, I simply didn’t find it to be an overly compelling one.
In making the case for abandoning race altogether however, I can’t get there based on this book. The main arguments border on naive (not acknowledging legitimately that society has incentives to continue to acknowledge race), blameful towards victims of race discrimination (his metaphor of someone being in a car accident needing to be the one to lead their rehab), and overly theoretical (not giving folks the tools to be race agnostic in a society that’s race specific).
I enjoyed learning a new perspective, I simply didn’t find it to be an overly compelling one.
December 10, 2019
3.5 stars? I'm perplexed. Williams takes on a dicey proposal: opt out of race. I know that race, like gender, is a social construct, and because of this we tend to live our lives by ascribing to preconceived notions about how we should act and be. This is problematic. But choosing to no longer identify with any race, such as Williams' stance as an "ex-black man," poses problems too. I won't get too deep into identity politics here, but many people find strength in their racial or gender makeup. It's a way for marginalized groups to take back some of the power.
Also, just because one chooses not to participate in race doesn't mean that they are immune to racism. Not to mention that if I suddenly declared I was no longer white because race doesn't exist, coming from me that would sound eerily similar to the whole "I don't see color" stance. So I think this idea of opting out of race doesn't work for everyone. I understand wanting a more fair and unified world that isn't codified by labels like black, white, Asian, etc., but I think it also erases cultural history and appreciation for difference.
Maybe Williams is just ahead of his time. In that case, only time will tell how well this memoir holds up.
Also, just because one chooses not to participate in race doesn't mean that they are immune to racism. Not to mention that if I suddenly declared I was no longer white because race doesn't exist, coming from me that would sound eerily similar to the whole "I don't see color" stance. So I think this idea of opting out of race doesn't work for everyone. I understand wanting a more fair and unified world that isn't codified by labels like black, white, Asian, etc., but I think it also erases cultural history and appreciation for difference.
Maybe Williams is just ahead of his time. In that case, only time will tell how well this memoir holds up.
February 3, 2021
Williams’s memoir is a meditation on racial categorization, ethnic identity, and the nature of what it means to be black or white.
Coming from a “red-black” Southern father and an “unambiguously white” mother whose ancestry is Northern European Protestants, he grew up in a middle-class home in the Eastern U.S. After college, he moved to France, married a French woman, and started a family. Like other American ex-pats, Paris was an existential tabula rasa where he could clean the slate and start over.
His father once told him, “race is not real. Race has harmed me severely,“ and much of the book is to invite the reader to judge whether Williams has moved beyond this. He has drawn from disparate sources and thought deeply about these topics. This is a smart and measured addition to this topic.
Coming from a “red-black” Southern father and an “unambiguously white” mother whose ancestry is Northern European Protestants, he grew up in a middle-class home in the Eastern U.S. After college, he moved to France, married a French woman, and started a family. Like other American ex-pats, Paris was an existential tabula rasa where he could clean the slate and start over.
His father once told him, “race is not real. Race has harmed me severely,“ and much of the book is to invite the reader to judge whether Williams has moved beyond this. He has drawn from disparate sources and thought deeply about these topics. This is a smart and measured addition to this topic.
June 6, 2023
Wow. I finished this book a few days ago, but I just don’t know what to say about it.
The author is a brilliant intellect and a modern thinker. Born to a black father and a white mother in the US, Mr. Williams always thought of himself as black. After his children were born with blond hair and blue eyes, he began to think very deeply about race, what it means to culture, and what it means to him.
Read superbly by the author, this audiobook held me spellbound from beginning to end. Incredibly thought-provoking and challenging to our ways of thinking about race, this book is well worth the time it takes to read it. As for the time you might spend pondering it afterward, I am still counting up. I definitely want to read more by Mr. Williams and some other authors he mentioned.
The author is a brilliant intellect and a modern thinker. Born to a black father and a white mother in the US, Mr. Williams always thought of himself as black. After his children were born with blond hair and blue eyes, he began to think very deeply about race, what it means to culture, and what it means to him.
Read superbly by the author, this audiobook held me spellbound from beginning to end. Incredibly thought-provoking and challenging to our ways of thinking about race, this book is well worth the time it takes to read it. As for the time you might spend pondering it afterward, I am still counting up. I definitely want to read more by Mr. Williams and some other authors he mentioned.
December 6, 2019
I have always been fascinated by race: what constitutes race; how do people self-identify; how important is it, and how has it impacted culture and history.
Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in a bi-racial home. His mother was a white woman, the daughter of a conservative preacher who attended Wheaton College in Illinois. His father, a black man, grew up in the South. Williams grew up in the northeast and led, what some would call a privileged upbringing.
It sounds to me rather that he grew up in a household with a father who expected him to succeed and he did. He attended college in New York City and while still a student was offered an advance to publish a book on race. Because I listened to this book on Hoopla, I am unable to refer to specific facts, such as what university he attended and whether it was this book or a previous book he wrote that was published while he was still in college, so for the sake of accuracy, I won't say.
Being a man that considers himself black while not looking black (many people, especially in Europe assumed he was an Arab) caused Williams, maybe not an identity crisis, but certainly led him on a journey, the fruit of which is this book.
What does it mean to be black? Is it cultural? Genetic? Both? Williams himself married a white French woman. How should their children view themselves? They look less black than he does.
So are they black? What is the "black experience"?
While I thought Williams was fairly even-handed, even though his political slant veered away from my own, neither did he jump on the bandwagon of "evil whitey who is the source of all the black man's problems". He points out that authors, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates who writes in a way that assumes every white person is a type rather than an individual and any interaction with black people can only be racially motivated-whether with hostility or kindness (they're only being condescending) really only serves to create racial division and mutual suspicion.
Williams protests against seeing anyone as a "type". We are just individuals and if we are going to accomplish racial unity, we're going to have throw out the old paradigms.
He believes this can be accomplished in a couple of ways. One, as the population of bi-racial people grow, there will be more and more people like himself that cannot view themselves as either black or white but as both. In other words, if we blur the lines of racial divisions to such an extent, people will not be able to view each other in such delineated ways.
Secondly, he believes race is an artificial construct. Humans created the concept of race, when, in fact, there is only one race, the human race. As people change their views on this, racism can one day be eradicated.
I think with the first point he is right to an extent. I recall a concert venue in Detroit that wanted to charge white people double. Backlash resulted in rescinding the policy, but what was not given enough media attention, in my opinion, was that not only white, but many bi-racial people refused to attend because it meant one of their parents was being treated unfairly.
I also agree that race is a man made construct that has an entrenched history and clearly delineated cultural lines. Instead of helping to erase those lines, many "woke" people today of all races seem to want to persist in the hatred. Maybe it gives then "raison d'etre", I don't know.
So it is indeed bold of Williams, while still very much liberal, to take an unpopular stand about race and its definitions and the repercussions of those definitions.
To complain, I will say I felt there was a little too much naval gazing. Surely every minority does not go through life with their wrist against their forehead, muttering "what am I? how do others view me?"
Most people of any color or combination thereof, surely have more meaningful things to do with their life. We cannot control how others view us. We are only in control of how we deal with the good and ugly things that life throws at us.
I think primarily the difference between Williams and myself is that he is an atheist, therefore must turn to Utopian hopes and ideals, while my identity is that of a child of God and this life is very short. Focus on eternity.
Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in a bi-racial home. His mother was a white woman, the daughter of a conservative preacher who attended Wheaton College in Illinois. His father, a black man, grew up in the South. Williams grew up in the northeast and led, what some would call a privileged upbringing.
It sounds to me rather that he grew up in a household with a father who expected him to succeed and he did. He attended college in New York City and while still a student was offered an advance to publish a book on race. Because I listened to this book on Hoopla, I am unable to refer to specific facts, such as what university he attended and whether it was this book or a previous book he wrote that was published while he was still in college, so for the sake of accuracy, I won't say.
Being a man that considers himself black while not looking black (many people, especially in Europe assumed he was an Arab) caused Williams, maybe not an identity crisis, but certainly led him on a journey, the fruit of which is this book.
What does it mean to be black? Is it cultural? Genetic? Both? Williams himself married a white French woman. How should their children view themselves? They look less black than he does.
So are they black? What is the "black experience"?
While I thought Williams was fairly even-handed, even though his political slant veered away from my own, neither did he jump on the bandwagon of "evil whitey who is the source of all the black man's problems". He points out that authors, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates who writes in a way that assumes every white person is a type rather than an individual and any interaction with black people can only be racially motivated-whether with hostility or kindness (they're only being condescending) really only serves to create racial division and mutual suspicion.
Williams protests against seeing anyone as a "type". We are just individuals and if we are going to accomplish racial unity, we're going to have throw out the old paradigms.
He believes this can be accomplished in a couple of ways. One, as the population of bi-racial people grow, there will be more and more people like himself that cannot view themselves as either black or white but as both. In other words, if we blur the lines of racial divisions to such an extent, people will not be able to view each other in such delineated ways.
Secondly, he believes race is an artificial construct. Humans created the concept of race, when, in fact, there is only one race, the human race. As people change their views on this, racism can one day be eradicated.
I think with the first point he is right to an extent. I recall a concert venue in Detroit that wanted to charge white people double. Backlash resulted in rescinding the policy, but what was not given enough media attention, in my opinion, was that not only white, but many bi-racial people refused to attend because it meant one of their parents was being treated unfairly.
I also agree that race is a man made construct that has an entrenched history and clearly delineated cultural lines. Instead of helping to erase those lines, many "woke" people today of all races seem to want to persist in the hatred. Maybe it gives then "raison d'etre", I don't know.
So it is indeed bold of Williams, while still very much liberal, to take an unpopular stand about race and its definitions and the repercussions of those definitions.
To complain, I will say I felt there was a little too much naval gazing. Surely every minority does not go through life with their wrist against their forehead, muttering "what am I? how do others view me?"
Most people of any color or combination thereof, surely have more meaningful things to do with their life. We cannot control how others view us. We are only in control of how we deal with the good and ugly things that life throws at us.
I think primarily the difference between Williams and myself is that he is an atheist, therefore must turn to Utopian hopes and ideals, while my identity is that of a child of God and this life is very short. Focus on eternity.
June 3, 2020
I was really torn as to how to rate this book and had to let it sink in before commenting. In the final analysis, I perceive the gestalt of Williams' analysis as a variant of embracing one's dominant identity (ie, if both 'black' and 'white,' choosing whiteness) and of choosing to identify with the white women in his life. Generally I would call this book, in the gestalt, a paean to white women.
Also, it is a statement about individuality that effectively minimizes or erases the power of collective dominance in favor of a color-blind stance. This is subtle, because he discusses race extensively, but in the final analysis, his stance is that an individual can simply decide not to have race. His stance reminds me of the way the US government treated African-Americans during the drug crisis of the 1980's and '90's, when black men in particular were dying of AIDS due to IV drug use. These men were not granted collective immunity, like white drug addicts are--ie, deaths of despair--they are told that, as individual black people, they should 'JUST SAY NO.' Chatterton-Thomas stance is similar: he argues to ignore larger collective realities such as worldwide white supremacy in favor of each individual person deciding that race doesn't exist. This dumps a lot of social responsibility on the backs of the oppressed group, which is similar to the stance that conservative people--and in particular, libertarians--take.
The overarching general stance this book takes is a fundamentally libertarian one: fend for yourself. You can decide race is over, and presto-change-o--it's gone.
Because it is very intellectual, it does suggest some compelling ideas, but ultimately conveys that whiteness is preferable in the same fashion as a conservative person of color might write it from an academic standpoint, with the addition of personal opinions.
This book reminded me of a long personal essay that might appear in Quillette, written by a conservative and thoughtful mixed-race POC.
Williams suggests that race and identity politics are overemphasized. He often refers to his daughter and his recognition of their perceived difference. This perceived difference is elaborated against a backdrop of dominance/subordination--he looks black and she looks white. Both his mother and his wife are also white; the women discussed in the book are, by and large, white ones. For obvious reasons, he seems to have a great deal of loyalty in this arena. It often seems as if Williams declines the actual import of the invented value of identity--the way it works in a sociopolitical context in the interest of resource distribution-- in favor of connecting with his daughter and his wife.
As a non-white, multi-racial (not black) mother of mixed-race children who have a white father, I truly sympathize with the desire to connect with one's (mostly) white-appearing daughter without the complex of white supremacy which forms our recent historical and current backdrop. I also wish that race didn't matter, that I could toss it in the bin in favor of pretending it has no impact. The problem is that, if we choose to identify with the individuals in our lives on a purely individual basis without recognizing the significant, all-encompassing reality in which all of us are embedded sociopolitically, we are simply in denial. As reading this, I wonder how Williams would negotiate this dilemma if one of his children looked white and the other looked not white: would he be as inclined to choose this stance? If he were forced to watch one of those children deal with racism on a regular basis, would his approach work at all? Racism still exists even when we don't like it.
And a half-era of denial indicates that ignoring important and ugly features of society does absolutely nothing to lead to clear-eyed perception or any comprehensive recognition of reality.
Williams' both academic and conversational tone reminds me of a few of my brown male relatives who wax poetic about equality but ultimately make sure everyone sees their blonde wives and daughters, which express their own 'whiteness.' I had to wait a few months for this to sink in before I could identify it, but when I did, it seemed crystal clear. This embrace of 'whiteness' is very subtle; it's not the overt commentary that we get from overt white supremacists; rather, it smacks of white 'liberal' subconscious denial.
** I perceive Williams as somebody who is in conflict about social realities and the way these clash with his personal, intimate connection with two individuals--his wife and white-appearing daughter--and who resolves this difficult tension by choosing to believe that tension simply has less relevance. He chooses to connect with his daughter even IF this means rejecting reality. It is a sympathetic choice--yes, all POC would love for racism to be over!-- but not prudent and perhaps more importantly, not accurate: social realities exist even when we don't like them. Williams seems to decide that, since he doesn't like them, perhaps he can just decide that they are peripheral and possibly irrelevant.***
It is possible that Williams writes this book only to assure himself of his connection to whiteness, in which case it works well as both intellectual opinion and thoughtfulness.
If, however, he does it to convince other POC's, it seems to me that he is too focused on denial.
Still, very thought-provoking and intellectual!
Conservative people of color may embrace this book readily. I have mixed-race male relatives of several different races whose wives and children are very white-appearing and for whom this book has relevance, and I believe that they would truly enjoy this book and would identify with Williams' choices.
As a mixed-race WOC in a large, mixed-race family, I perceive this book as a paean to white women.
Also, it is a statement about individuality that effectively minimizes or erases the power of collective dominance in favor of a color-blind stance. This is subtle, because he discusses race extensively, but in the final analysis, his stance is that an individual can simply decide not to have race. His stance reminds me of the way the US government treated African-Americans during the drug crisis of the 1980's and '90's, when black men in particular were dying of AIDS due to IV drug use. These men were not granted collective immunity, like white drug addicts are--ie, deaths of despair--they are told that, as individual black people, they should 'JUST SAY NO.' Chatterton-Thomas stance is similar: he argues to ignore larger collective realities such as worldwide white supremacy in favor of each individual person deciding that race doesn't exist. This dumps a lot of social responsibility on the backs of the oppressed group, which is similar to the stance that conservative people--and in particular, libertarians--take.
The overarching general stance this book takes is a fundamentally libertarian one: fend for yourself. You can decide race is over, and presto-change-o--it's gone.
Because it is very intellectual, it does suggest some compelling ideas, but ultimately conveys that whiteness is preferable in the same fashion as a conservative person of color might write it from an academic standpoint, with the addition of personal opinions.
This book reminded me of a long personal essay that might appear in Quillette, written by a conservative and thoughtful mixed-race POC.
Williams suggests that race and identity politics are overemphasized. He often refers to his daughter and his recognition of their perceived difference. This perceived difference is elaborated against a backdrop of dominance/subordination--he looks black and she looks white. Both his mother and his wife are also white; the women discussed in the book are, by and large, white ones. For obvious reasons, he seems to have a great deal of loyalty in this arena. It often seems as if Williams declines the actual import of the invented value of identity--the way it works in a sociopolitical context in the interest of resource distribution-- in favor of connecting with his daughter and his wife.
As a non-white, multi-racial (not black) mother of mixed-race children who have a white father, I truly sympathize with the desire to connect with one's (mostly) white-appearing daughter without the complex of white supremacy which forms our recent historical and current backdrop. I also wish that race didn't matter, that I could toss it in the bin in favor of pretending it has no impact. The problem is that, if we choose to identify with the individuals in our lives on a purely individual basis without recognizing the significant, all-encompassing reality in which all of us are embedded sociopolitically, we are simply in denial. As reading this, I wonder how Williams would negotiate this dilemma if one of his children looked white and the other looked not white: would he be as inclined to choose this stance? If he were forced to watch one of those children deal with racism on a regular basis, would his approach work at all? Racism still exists even when we don't like it.
And a half-era of denial indicates that ignoring important and ugly features of society does absolutely nothing to lead to clear-eyed perception or any comprehensive recognition of reality.
Williams' both academic and conversational tone reminds me of a few of my brown male relatives who wax poetic about equality but ultimately make sure everyone sees their blonde wives and daughters, which express their own 'whiteness.' I had to wait a few months for this to sink in before I could identify it, but when I did, it seemed crystal clear. This embrace of 'whiteness' is very subtle; it's not the overt commentary that we get from overt white supremacists; rather, it smacks of white 'liberal' subconscious denial.
** I perceive Williams as somebody who is in conflict about social realities and the way these clash with his personal, intimate connection with two individuals--his wife and white-appearing daughter--and who resolves this difficult tension by choosing to believe that tension simply has less relevance. He chooses to connect with his daughter even IF this means rejecting reality. It is a sympathetic choice--yes, all POC would love for racism to be over!-- but not prudent and perhaps more importantly, not accurate: social realities exist even when we don't like them. Williams seems to decide that, since he doesn't like them, perhaps he can just decide that they are peripheral and possibly irrelevant.***
It is possible that Williams writes this book only to assure himself of his connection to whiteness, in which case it works well as both intellectual opinion and thoughtfulness.
If, however, he does it to convince other POC's, it seems to me that he is too focused on denial.
Still, very thought-provoking and intellectual!
Conservative people of color may embrace this book readily. I have mixed-race male relatives of several different races whose wives and children are very white-appearing and for whom this book has relevance, and I believe that they would truly enjoy this book and would identify with Williams' choices.
As a mixed-race WOC in a large, mixed-race family, I perceive this book as a paean to white women.
June 15, 2020
It's a beautifully argued book, but it's not a beautifully written book. The prose could use some serious editing for clarity and brevity, and the overall structure is a mess. I agree with other reviewers who feel that this is a book-length essay more than it is a book.
Why should you read it then? Because it offers a humble, necessary, and dire course correction to the out-of-control hegemony within pop culture and social-media culture of what passes for received knowledge when it comes to race: It has always existed as a social construct (wrong); it is understood the same way by people "of the same race" across cultures (wrong); and, perhaps most disturbing, if we just recognize it, talk about it enough, view everything and everyone through the lens of it, and ignore or actively attack anyone who disagrees with said received knowledge, racism and racial prejudice will magically disappear.
Williams doesn't deny racism's pernicious and seemingly all-encompassing taint. He doesn't pretend that pretending it doesn't exist will cause it to cease to exist. He doesn't even argue that everyone can or should stop using it as a useful exegetical construct. He does, however, make a courageous and--somewhat oddly--unpopular argument that one important way to stop racism from having an effect on people of color is for people of color to refuse to counter the fallacies of white supremacy with arguments that merely mirror those fallacies with a positive spin. He also appeals to the universalism of human experience in all its diversity and argues very persuasively that every human being can learn about other human beings' lives without having to belong to or privilege any given in-group. Culture has very little to do with biology and genetics and everything to do with shared experiences, histories, and practices. In short, people of any "race" (to use Williams's mock-scare quotes when it comes to ideas he doesn't believe in anymore) can learn enough about another "race's" culture (especially if they grow up within it and never see themselves as separate from it even though outsiders might not perceive them as belonging to it) to fully inhabit it.
Similar ideas used to be widespread. It's puzzling that they elicit such a backlash now, but it can also be exasperating to attempt the logical and especially verbal contortions required to speak about race accurately and fulsomely without resorting to lazy essentialism.
Unfortunately, the most interesting and cogent part of the book comes at the end. If you really want to understand Williams's argument but aren't interested in how he has come to the conclusions he has, read Part 3, "Self-Portrait of an Ex-Black Man."
Why should you read it then? Because it offers a humble, necessary, and dire course correction to the out-of-control hegemony within pop culture and social-media culture of what passes for received knowledge when it comes to race: It has always existed as a social construct (wrong); it is understood the same way by people "of the same race" across cultures (wrong); and, perhaps most disturbing, if we just recognize it, talk about it enough, view everything and everyone through the lens of it, and ignore or actively attack anyone who disagrees with said received knowledge, racism and racial prejudice will magically disappear.
Williams doesn't deny racism's pernicious and seemingly all-encompassing taint. He doesn't pretend that pretending it doesn't exist will cause it to cease to exist. He doesn't even argue that everyone can or should stop using it as a useful exegetical construct. He does, however, make a courageous and--somewhat oddly--unpopular argument that one important way to stop racism from having an effect on people of color is for people of color to refuse to counter the fallacies of white supremacy with arguments that merely mirror those fallacies with a positive spin. He also appeals to the universalism of human experience in all its diversity and argues very persuasively that every human being can learn about other human beings' lives without having to belong to or privilege any given in-group. Culture has very little to do with biology and genetics and everything to do with shared experiences, histories, and practices. In short, people of any "race" (to use Williams's mock-scare quotes when it comes to ideas he doesn't believe in anymore) can learn enough about another "race's" culture (especially if they grow up within it and never see themselves as separate from it even though outsiders might not perceive them as belonging to it) to fully inhabit it.
Similar ideas used to be widespread. It's puzzling that they elicit such a backlash now, but it can also be exasperating to attempt the logical and especially verbal contortions required to speak about race accurately and fulsomely without resorting to lazy essentialism.
Unfortunately, the most interesting and cogent part of the book comes at the end. If you really want to understand Williams's argument but aren't interested in how he has come to the conclusions he has, read Part 3, "Self-Portrait of an Ex-Black Man."
November 20, 2019
What a fantastic, thoughtful, and insightful book. The title alone may cause some to scoff and dismiss it outright, but I challenge them to read it anyway. Thomas Chatterton Williams is a gifted and incisive writer, and—given the subject matter as well as the honesty with which he explores it—I don’t think it hyperbolic in the least to say, a brave one as well.
Challenging us as he challenges himself, and deftly navigating the minefield this topic is at this point in history and public discourse, Williams carefully makes his way without detonating a single one.
I can’t recommend this book enough. Go read it. Now.
Challenging us as he challenges himself, and deftly navigating the minefield this topic is at this point in history and public discourse, Williams carefully makes his way without detonating a single one.
I can’t recommend this book enough. Go read it. Now.
November 15, 2020
I was sent a copy of this book to review. Personally I really like and agree with a lot of what Williams has to say. I also recognize that his experience (as does he) is unique. He evokes many of the other middle group race academics (Loury and Whorton) with whom I also agree and I think really highlights the intersection between class and race in America.
I see race as the social construction manipulated by elite whites to pit lower class whites against all the other groups in a struggle for limited resources. I think this description is both born out though history and disgustingly obvious in today's Trump America. Personally, I think middle class and middle educated both blacks and whites are much less invested in the race wars. This is not to say that race does not impact EVERYONE, it is to say that those of us who see a way forward are those in the middle while the top is busy fostering hate between those at the bottom. Williams is uniquely pitched in that he not only is "one of us in the middle" economically, but also light skinned and mixed race with a dark black father and a bright pale daughter and so he is very much in the middle of the skin tone spectrum. He presents a strong personal argument (with his own and his daughter's genetic past) against the dichotomy of race. We have to recognize that everything is a spectrum and there is no point at which one is "black" or "white": "The notion of the 'other' is false." and "Purity is always a lie".
All of that said, I think Williams' own quotes present his argument better than I:
"I am convinced--profoundly so--that what all of us feel we owe to each other must transcend narrow group identity and be rooted in values that strive to be universal (a loaded term in itself, I know, but still the best we can conceive) if it is to mean anything at all"
In describing the lower class white folks who buy in completely to racist propaganda: "On their sneering faces, and sometimes in their belligerent words, we cam to realize that these people--whos very lives and economic prospects were walking and talking proof of the diminishing value of whiteness as a racial category--did no interpret the arrival of a black president as anything resembling progress."
In describing his father's position on race: "It is his consistency that I most admire here--his willingness to hold two bitterly conflicting ideas in his head at once: race is not real; race has harmed me severely--regardless of the particular circumstances, and not to allow his own biography or history to dictate his children's."
His call to reject racial argument for the sake of argument: "I realize that I am also playing a role, willing myself, even, into some strange communion with an anger that exists somewhere outside of me--an anger that has never rightfully been my own. The lived experience behind the anger belongs to someone else, to a memory....Racisim--like 'race'--will always be what it's always been, we tell ourselves, and there can be no exit or respite....I do not, and do not wish, to see myself in the master, but can--and should--I really claim to glimpse in the slave's face my own eternal reflection?"
I also agree with his analysis that he doesn't "believe that most white people actively hate black people; the truth, in my experience, is less dramatic: Most white people don't or cannot think very seriously and with adequate nuance and stamina about black people at all. And they lack the imagination or will to try." The call here is (as always) for more education and better integration. As we start to see people as INDIVIDUALS and not members of categories, we open up the possibility to learn from each other and develop relationships rather than foster stereotypes and lack of interest.
As a white lady who was terrified by Coates' Between the World and Me, I (of course) enjoyed his perspective that both sides need to treat each other with curiosity and interest, rather than skepticism and fear. He gives us hope with the idea that "any human being properly motivated and educated is capable of outgrowing the bounds and divisions of identiy, of touching the universal."
Ultimately, we need to move beyond race, but do so with an appreciation of its historical significance. We cannot ask those at the bottom to move past the constructs that hold them in place, but I agree that focusing on the bars of the cage also do not allow us to imagine a future without the cage. Personally I think we need to address poverty (among all groups) in order to promote tranquility and start to build a country in which equal opportunity for everyone is an actual goal and not just an ideal to which we give lip service.
I see race as the social construction manipulated by elite whites to pit lower class whites against all the other groups in a struggle for limited resources. I think this description is both born out though history and disgustingly obvious in today's Trump America. Personally, I think middle class and middle educated both blacks and whites are much less invested in the race wars. This is not to say that race does not impact EVERYONE, it is to say that those of us who see a way forward are those in the middle while the top is busy fostering hate between those at the bottom. Williams is uniquely pitched in that he not only is "one of us in the middle" economically, but also light skinned and mixed race with a dark black father and a bright pale daughter and so he is very much in the middle of the skin tone spectrum. He presents a strong personal argument (with his own and his daughter's genetic past) against the dichotomy of race. We have to recognize that everything is a spectrum and there is no point at which one is "black" or "white": "The notion of the 'other' is false." and "Purity is always a lie".
All of that said, I think Williams' own quotes present his argument better than I:
"I am convinced--profoundly so--that what all of us feel we owe to each other must transcend narrow group identity and be rooted in values that strive to be universal (a loaded term in itself, I know, but still the best we can conceive) if it is to mean anything at all"
In describing the lower class white folks who buy in completely to racist propaganda: "On their sneering faces, and sometimes in their belligerent words, we cam to realize that these people--whos very lives and economic prospects were walking and talking proof of the diminishing value of whiteness as a racial category--did no interpret the arrival of a black president as anything resembling progress."
In describing his father's position on race: "It is his consistency that I most admire here--his willingness to hold two bitterly conflicting ideas in his head at once: race is not real; race has harmed me severely--regardless of the particular circumstances, and not to allow his own biography or history to dictate his children's."
His call to reject racial argument for the sake of argument: "I realize that I am also playing a role, willing myself, even, into some strange communion with an anger that exists somewhere outside of me--an anger that has never rightfully been my own. The lived experience behind the anger belongs to someone else, to a memory....Racisim--like 'race'--will always be what it's always been, we tell ourselves, and there can be no exit or respite....I do not, and do not wish, to see myself in the master, but can--and should--I really claim to glimpse in the slave's face my own eternal reflection?"
I also agree with his analysis that he doesn't "believe that most white people actively hate black people; the truth, in my experience, is less dramatic: Most white people don't or cannot think very seriously and with adequate nuance and stamina about black people at all. And they lack the imagination or will to try." The call here is (as always) for more education and better integration. As we start to see people as INDIVIDUALS and not members of categories, we open up the possibility to learn from each other and develop relationships rather than foster stereotypes and lack of interest.
As a white lady who was terrified by Coates' Between the World and Me, I (of course) enjoyed his perspective that both sides need to treat each other with curiosity and interest, rather than skepticism and fear. He gives us hope with the idea that "any human being properly motivated and educated is capable of outgrowing the bounds and divisions of identiy, of touching the universal."
Ultimately, we need to move beyond race, but do so with an appreciation of its historical significance. We cannot ask those at the bottom to move past the constructs that hold them in place, but I agree that focusing on the bars of the cage also do not allow us to imagine a future without the cage. Personally I think we need to address poverty (among all groups) in order to promote tranquility and start to build a country in which equal opportunity for everyone is an actual goal and not just an ideal to which we give lip service.
June 15, 2020
What a kind and thoughtful book, the most nuanced I've read so far on the subject of race post-Trump. Williams, a man born to a black father and a white mother who came to a reckoning with his racial identity when it turned out his newborn daughter looked decidedly white, believes that in order to solve the problems caused by racism in our society, people need to abandon the biologically-incorrect idea of race, even in the face of its real force as a social construct. Calling himself an "ex-black man," he concedes that many will see this stance as naive. But, he writes, "a certain degree of naivete is what is needed most if we are ever to solve the tragedy of racism in the absence of human races. We already know where self-certain oversophistication inevitably leads us."
I gave the book four rather than five stars because, like many of the other reviewers on this site and elsewhere, I don't think there is enough practical advice here on how to "un-identify" with one's race, beyond purely symbolic actions like checking "prefer not to say" on questionnaires. This is especially true for people of color who experience frequent slights and indignities because of their race. How can you ask such people to drop something they didn't choose in the first place, something that has brought them both great difficulty and often great pride for their entire lives?
But reading this book nonetheless gave me some good ideas to chew on and the much-sought awareness of someone out there who is at least somewhat of an optimist when it comes to solving the problem of racism. I especially liked Williams' comparison of his white cousin with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though I learned some good lessons from Coates' Between the World and Me, since reading it I've become more and more troubled by his one-dimensional and pessimistic attitude.
Williams is troubled by it, too. He describes his cousin as a "willfully ignorant, myopic and provincial girl" whose clueless remarks on social media about a project of his documenting the lives of black men showed no "mental bandwidth or desire to think very hard about experiences that differ even slightly from her own." Coates, meanwhile, he writes, "flattens the psychological and material difference within and between groups, and only serves to bolster a permanent sense of injury that doesn't necessarily align with his own circumstance. If this is the means by which our nation's leading thinker and explainer of complicated matters of race and identity understands the actions, experiences, and motives of the various white people he encounters--with more force and eloquence than my cousin, no doubt, but with startlingly similar inflexibility and lack of generosity--then I fear we are going to be spending quite a lot of time talking past each other instead of reaching a common truth."
Also like Williams, I've been dismayed since the 2016 election by "well-meaning white friends" in my social media feed who "flagellate themselves, sincerely or performatively apologizing for their 'whiteness,' as if they were somehow born into original sin." It's not that Williams (or I) disagree that the aftermath of the election brought out some blatant, old-school racism, an ugliness that despite what some of us wanted to believe never went away, and thereby highlighted institutional and systemic problems and often-subconscious individual attitudes that contribute to more subtle racism as well. But he (and I) don't agree that acknowledging these problems means that one must also believe that everything about this country's history, institutions, and ideals--or that everything about one's self (in the case of these self-flagellating white people)--is also fatally flawed.
"A more durable rejection of Trumpism and the racism and xenophobia that animate it requires an appeal to deeper and more profound ways of not merely tolerating but integrating with each other," he writes. "This in turn will have to be based on the convincing expression of shared ideals and democratic values that are accessible to all, regardless of personal background."
Again, more practical ideas for how that expression will look would have rounded this book out. But Williams cites numerous intellectuals (among them Adrian Piper, an artist who in 2012 publicly "retired" from being black) who might be able to offer more ideas on that. I will read up on them. And I also plan to buy this book and dip into it again and again. It's bracing and hopeful. I think many of us could use the fresh air it blows into the current national conversation about race.
I gave the book four rather than five stars because, like many of the other reviewers on this site and elsewhere, I don't think there is enough practical advice here on how to "un-identify" with one's race, beyond purely symbolic actions like checking "prefer not to say" on questionnaires. This is especially true for people of color who experience frequent slights and indignities because of their race. How can you ask such people to drop something they didn't choose in the first place, something that has brought them both great difficulty and often great pride for their entire lives?
But reading this book nonetheless gave me some good ideas to chew on and the much-sought awareness of someone out there who is at least somewhat of an optimist when it comes to solving the problem of racism. I especially liked Williams' comparison of his white cousin with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though I learned some good lessons from Coates' Between the World and Me, since reading it I've become more and more troubled by his one-dimensional and pessimistic attitude.
Williams is troubled by it, too. He describes his cousin as a "willfully ignorant, myopic and provincial girl" whose clueless remarks on social media about a project of his documenting the lives of black men showed no "mental bandwidth or desire to think very hard about experiences that differ even slightly from her own." Coates, meanwhile, he writes, "flattens the psychological and material difference within and between groups, and only serves to bolster a permanent sense of injury that doesn't necessarily align with his own circumstance. If this is the means by which our nation's leading thinker and explainer of complicated matters of race and identity understands the actions, experiences, and motives of the various white people he encounters--with more force and eloquence than my cousin, no doubt, but with startlingly similar inflexibility and lack of generosity--then I fear we are going to be spending quite a lot of time talking past each other instead of reaching a common truth."
Also like Williams, I've been dismayed since the 2016 election by "well-meaning white friends" in my social media feed who "flagellate themselves, sincerely or performatively apologizing for their 'whiteness,' as if they were somehow born into original sin." It's not that Williams (or I) disagree that the aftermath of the election brought out some blatant, old-school racism, an ugliness that despite what some of us wanted to believe never went away, and thereby highlighted institutional and systemic problems and often-subconscious individual attitudes that contribute to more subtle racism as well. But he (and I) don't agree that acknowledging these problems means that one must also believe that everything about this country's history, institutions, and ideals--or that everything about one's self (in the case of these self-flagellating white people)--is also fatally flawed.
"A more durable rejection of Trumpism and the racism and xenophobia that animate it requires an appeal to deeper and more profound ways of not merely tolerating but integrating with each other," he writes. "This in turn will have to be based on the convincing expression of shared ideals and democratic values that are accessible to all, regardless of personal background."
Again, more practical ideas for how that expression will look would have rounded this book out. But Williams cites numerous intellectuals (among them Adrian Piper, an artist who in 2012 publicly "retired" from being black) who might be able to offer more ideas on that. I will read up on them. And I also plan to buy this book and dip into it again and again. It's bracing and hopeful. I think many of us could use the fresh air it blows into the current national conversation about race.
March 30, 2022
Let me say up front that I admire TCW's work in general but that I'm an academic, and I prefer more rigorously structured arguments when it comes to topics like this. This book is sort of half essay half memoir, and as the reader you have to assemble the pieces of the argument as they come up. I'd love to read the 2000 word essay version of this book as well, just to straighten things out in my own head. Just a caveat.
This is an exploration of the idea of race in a society that is increasingly mixed race but in which racism and racial inequality remain powerful. The book was sparked by TCW having a daughter with his white wife who basically looks "white," as in she is essentially white skinned, blue eyed, and blonde haired. This process made him think more about his own identity, particularly because he is now living in France where he is rarely seen as "black." He arrives that the argument that for all the halting progress we have made on racial issues (and TCW does not exaggerate this progress or its tenuousness), we are still somewhat stuck in the racist's racial paradigm in which a single drop of "black blood" makes you black. His daughter has "black blood," but few people of either black or white identity are purely that color, and it raises crucial questions about how mixed-race people (another hazy term) can and should identify in the future.
TCW is very fair and open to the challenges of identity in an increasingly mixed world. His best point is that we need to find ways to deconstruct rather than deepen race as one of the primary markers of our society. Race is an absurd fiction conjured to justify oppression in relatively recent history; scientific racism dates to just a few hundred years ago. And yet, because American society treated someone with a speck of black blood as black, and treated black people as non-citizens and non-equals for so long (continuing today in many forms), African-American tend to identify with their group, and that is completely reasonable and understandable. Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria, as the famous book title asks? Because white people are often exhausting and impenetrable in their ignorance, and we all want to be around people who get our lives and experiences. And yet again, if society really improves on race, is it okay for this form of identification to just fall away? Is that a betrayal or progress? TCW doesn't quite answer these questions because he doesn't fully know; they are extremely personal, difficult, and context-specific.
TCW's work raises an important question about the long black struggle for equality, dignity, and opportunity: what is the end goal? If the end goal to be able to transcend race or simply not identify as black regardless of your color? Or is it to keep one's black identity and to keep rising and fighting in honor of your ancestors and what you owe them? Is TCW somehow betraying his black ancestors if he doesn't race his daughter to be black in identity, or would doing so constitute falling into the trap of racial boxes once again? His memoir, which you kind of have to read to fully get this book (it's brilliant), is all about how as a teenager he embraced a prepackaged black/hip-hop identity that led him astray and was, in his opinion, essentially anti-intellectual. However, he feels a tremendous amount of guilt, I think, about trying to transition to a post-racial identity even as he still deeply identifies with black culture and black intellectual traditions and recognizes that it is much easier for him to do make this transition as a very light-skinned person living abroad. This is all reasonable, and I think TCW's purpose in this book is to put these questions on the table more than it is to chart a systematic theoretical path our of racial identity.
But that path, I think (and I'm open to all thoughts on this from all people), has to taken, and for it to be taken it has to be envisioned. MLK as I've said a million times before, gave us a simple but powerful vision of this future where he said that people should be judged by the content of their character but not the color of their skin. Still, that doesn't answer the questions of identity that TCW asks here: we can still identify with a race or ethnicity without being judged, but does identifying as such just make race more sticky when we should be trying to move beyond it? I've always thought a nice future would be one in which an increasingly mixed population treats skin color as equally irrelevant to social status, presumed intelligence, etc as eye color is now, but does that mean erasing people's attachment to important traditions of thought, culture, and struggle?
It doesn't necessarily (and here I'm going off from TCW's analysis) because I think that people of many identities can and should identify with traditions that are not "theirs" in a strict sense. This is my deep liberal humanism speaking, but I strongly identify with the black intellectual and political tradition, at least one strain of it. To me, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, MLK, Obama, TCW, and many others are not just brilliant and courageous black thinkers and politicians but central to the American story as a whole. While I disagree with much of the 1619 project, I think they got it right in saying that the best Americans have been black Americans: they have been the ones constantly pushing to make us become our better selves. This isn't because black people are inherently better than white people (reading some modern critical race theory leaves that impression) but because their position in society as an oppressed minority compelled them to think about inclusion, equality, and the true meaning of American values in a deeper and more sophisticated way than most white Americans. Sadly, many people may think what I'm doing is appropriating, but that's silly. Rather, I'm identifying with this tradition and struggle because it is so important to changing this country into what I want it to be. So in a future of mixed race people, we all need to have the intelligence and werewithal to look at the past, and our personal lineages, and decide: what ideas and actions do we want to identify with? With whom? How can we understand and admire our ancestors while also improving upon them? The kind of hybrid identity that Barack Obama has (he identifies with both his white and black "sides" and with many figures of all races, genders, and backgrounds in
This thought chain ultimately leads us back to the need to think of universal values that can connect disparate groups, create fair ground, and bring us together. TCW is right, I think, that modern critical race theory, even though it gets a lot of things right about the history and nature of racial oppression, is hopelessly mired in racial boxes and is indeed reconstituting those boxes. It has no vision of progress and doesn't even seem to think that escaping or minimizing race would be a good thing. The core paradox of CRT is that it acknowledges that race is a social construction but treats it now as essentially un-deconstructible, a permanent stain on our nation and an original sin for all white people. It also endorses other forms of essentialism in treating minority groups as have special ways of knowing or almost mystical capabilities compared to nearly demonic whites. This, to put it mildly, is not the way out but a way of reinforcing essentialist thinking about race.
TCW doesn't always give clear answers to these important questions, but he is pointing us to the right questions without giving simple answers. This book is part of a conversation that needs to keep growing.
This is an exploration of the idea of race in a society that is increasingly mixed race but in which racism and racial inequality remain powerful. The book was sparked by TCW having a daughter with his white wife who basically looks "white," as in she is essentially white skinned, blue eyed, and blonde haired. This process made him think more about his own identity, particularly because he is now living in France where he is rarely seen as "black." He arrives that the argument that for all the halting progress we have made on racial issues (and TCW does not exaggerate this progress or its tenuousness), we are still somewhat stuck in the racist's racial paradigm in which a single drop of "black blood" makes you black. His daughter has "black blood," but few people of either black or white identity are purely that color, and it raises crucial questions about how mixed-race people (another hazy term) can and should identify in the future.
TCW is very fair and open to the challenges of identity in an increasingly mixed world. His best point is that we need to find ways to deconstruct rather than deepen race as one of the primary markers of our society. Race is an absurd fiction conjured to justify oppression in relatively recent history; scientific racism dates to just a few hundred years ago. And yet, because American society treated someone with a speck of black blood as black, and treated black people as non-citizens and non-equals for so long (continuing today in many forms), African-American tend to identify with their group, and that is completely reasonable and understandable. Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria, as the famous book title asks? Because white people are often exhausting and impenetrable in their ignorance, and we all want to be around people who get our lives and experiences. And yet again, if society really improves on race, is it okay for this form of identification to just fall away? Is that a betrayal or progress? TCW doesn't quite answer these questions because he doesn't fully know; they are extremely personal, difficult, and context-specific.
TCW's work raises an important question about the long black struggle for equality, dignity, and opportunity: what is the end goal? If the end goal to be able to transcend race or simply not identify as black regardless of your color? Or is it to keep one's black identity and to keep rising and fighting in honor of your ancestors and what you owe them? Is TCW somehow betraying his black ancestors if he doesn't race his daughter to be black in identity, or would doing so constitute falling into the trap of racial boxes once again? His memoir, which you kind of have to read to fully get this book (it's brilliant), is all about how as a teenager he embraced a prepackaged black/hip-hop identity that led him astray and was, in his opinion, essentially anti-intellectual. However, he feels a tremendous amount of guilt, I think, about trying to transition to a post-racial identity even as he still deeply identifies with black culture and black intellectual traditions and recognizes that it is much easier for him to do make this transition as a very light-skinned person living abroad. This is all reasonable, and I think TCW's purpose in this book is to put these questions on the table more than it is to chart a systematic theoretical path our of racial identity.
But that path, I think (and I'm open to all thoughts on this from all people), has to taken, and for it to be taken it has to be envisioned. MLK as I've said a million times before, gave us a simple but powerful vision of this future where he said that people should be judged by the content of their character but not the color of their skin. Still, that doesn't answer the questions of identity that TCW asks here: we can still identify with a race or ethnicity without being judged, but does identifying as such just make race more sticky when we should be trying to move beyond it? I've always thought a nice future would be one in which an increasingly mixed population treats skin color as equally irrelevant to social status, presumed intelligence, etc as eye color is now, but does that mean erasing people's attachment to important traditions of thought, culture, and struggle?
It doesn't necessarily (and here I'm going off from TCW's analysis) because I think that people of many identities can and should identify with traditions that are not "theirs" in a strict sense. This is my deep liberal humanism speaking, but I strongly identify with the black intellectual and political tradition, at least one strain of it. To me, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, MLK, Obama, TCW, and many others are not just brilliant and courageous black thinkers and politicians but central to the American story as a whole. While I disagree with much of the 1619 project, I think they got it right in saying that the best Americans have been black Americans: they have been the ones constantly pushing to make us become our better selves. This isn't because black people are inherently better than white people (reading some modern critical race theory leaves that impression) but because their position in society as an oppressed minority compelled them to think about inclusion, equality, and the true meaning of American values in a deeper and more sophisticated way than most white Americans. Sadly, many people may think what I'm doing is appropriating, but that's silly. Rather, I'm identifying with this tradition and struggle because it is so important to changing this country into what I want it to be. So in a future of mixed race people, we all need to have the intelligence and werewithal to look at the past, and our personal lineages, and decide: what ideas and actions do we want to identify with? With whom? How can we understand and admire our ancestors while also improving upon them? The kind of hybrid identity that Barack Obama has (he identifies with both his white and black "sides" and with many figures of all races, genders, and backgrounds in
This thought chain ultimately leads us back to the need to think of universal values that can connect disparate groups, create fair ground, and bring us together. TCW is right, I think, that modern critical race theory, even though it gets a lot of things right about the history and nature of racial oppression, is hopelessly mired in racial boxes and is indeed reconstituting those boxes. It has no vision of progress and doesn't even seem to think that escaping or minimizing race would be a good thing. The core paradox of CRT is that it acknowledges that race is a social construction but treats it now as essentially un-deconstructible, a permanent stain on our nation and an original sin for all white people. It also endorses other forms of essentialism in treating minority groups as have special ways of knowing or almost mystical capabilities compared to nearly demonic whites. This, to put it mildly, is not the way out but a way of reinforcing essentialist thinking about race.
TCW doesn't always give clear answers to these important questions, but he is pointing us to the right questions without giving simple answers. This book is part of a conversation that needs to keep growing.
January 12, 2020
What a well written book! Once I heard Thomas Chatterton Williams on the New York Times book review podcast I ran to the library and was the first to borrow the book. I always want to learn about race and issues dealing with race relations. This book however was more self-serving than enlightening. I understand the world changing event that having a child can be yet following Chatterton-Williams on his journey of racial discovery seemed as if he was searching for a way, a reason to rid himself and daughter of race.
The book is well researched and givings good information to support the author's point of view. I agree that race is a social construct but to dismiss it's relevance as a political reality in today's world is dangerous and irresponsible. Quite frankly, it is easy to do this while living in France. In the great tradition of Baldwin however this author is no James Baldwin. My hope for those who read this book is that it forces hard conversations about race that our world so desperately needs. Starting the conversation may be the role this well written book serves but really that's all the book has to offer.
The book is well researched and givings good information to support the author's point of view. I agree that race is a social construct but to dismiss it's relevance as a political reality in today's world is dangerous and irresponsible. Quite frankly, it is easy to do this while living in France. In the great tradition of Baldwin however this author is no James Baldwin. My hope for those who read this book is that it forces hard conversations about race that our world so desperately needs. Starting the conversation may be the role this well written book serves but really that's all the book has to offer.
October 7, 2022
He’s right: Race is a social construct. The boundaries that separate us are purely imaginary. Race is a confidence game.
What he fails to address is that the consequences of race/ racism are real. The timing of this book could not be poorer.
Williams takes Aim at Coates’ Between The World and Me.
Williams failure at countering Coates is remarkable.
Namely because Coates writes to his son to warn him of the potential dangers of being physically characterized as black. Williams writes with his daughter in mind, who is blonde-haired, blue-eyed and quite “fair”.
This book is for :
Those who are tired of talking about race. And wish to racial gaslight.
Those who wish to distance themselves from their black heritage.
Navigating through race is the reality of the world we live in. Perhaps we circle back on this book 200 years from
Now and see if it holds up.
What he fails to address is that the consequences of race/ racism are real. The timing of this book could not be poorer.
Williams takes Aim at Coates’ Between The World and Me.
Williams failure at countering Coates is remarkable.
Namely because Coates writes to his son to warn him of the potential dangers of being physically characterized as black. Williams writes with his daughter in mind, who is blonde-haired, blue-eyed and quite “fair”.
This book is for :
Those who are tired of talking about race. And wish to racial gaslight.
Those who wish to distance themselves from their black heritage.
Navigating through race is the reality of the world we live in. Perhaps we circle back on this book 200 years from
Now and see if it holds up.
July 7, 2021
I enjoyed reading this and seeing a different perspective from what is the more obvious trend in this field. There is a challenge in this book to many intellectuals who deal with questions of race. I appreciated the goal of moving past racial categories which are social constructs anyway. There was just something hollow about the whole exercise- which he also seems to understand- as if the writing was happening outside of the reality of the world. I got the sense that he tried to avoid this very fact but I felt it was inescapable for me.
The differences in how Europeans see race versus Americans was something I never really noticed and I found it enlightening to hear from his perspective.
The differences in how Europeans see race versus Americans was something I never really noticed and I found it enlightening to hear from his perspective.
August 3, 2022
I enjoyed this. In the genre of contemporary memoirs about race in America, it was a nice counterbalance to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (which I also liked). Along with sharing diverse chapters of his life, Williams raises a bunch of interesting, provocative questions about identity, provides some interesting statistics, and challenges the more pessimistic ‘Coatesian’ view of the future of race in America. What Coates sees as a fitting response to centuries of undeniably horrific hatred and violence, Williams seems to see as a defeatist internalisation of racial division, albeit, he admits, totally justified and understandable. I definitely get both perspectives. And just as with Coates, a lot feels unresolved.
Williams argues that we have accepted a racial essentialism, moulded by centuries-old racist ideas, that harms progress and that we need to turn away. He raises all these questions about whether racial category is necessary (concluding it is not), but leaves you with really no idea what to do about it. How do we get from here to that post-racial haven? It still feels abstract. Despite this, I wouldn’t call his thinking naïve - he fully acknowledges and explores a whole bunch of tensions and challenges, and readily admits he doesn’t have the answers. I see his argument more as a rough outline of a far-off worthy goal that he feels many may not even see as worth pursuing. I’m not left completely convinced it’s worth pursuing. But one doesn’t really have to advocate for the entire eradication of racial category to at least buy his arguments on the potential merit of more ambiguous and less reified classification of people, cultures, subcultures, etc. I don’t know how he or anyone else is going to do this. I could see why if people thought this book’s argument was more relevant to some future millennium, rather than today’s. But, a good read. Just a guy appealing to universal values and fleshing out some hopeful ideas about ‘unlearning race’ for the benefit of humanity, informed by his own life experience - in particular, his time in France and the birth of his white-looking blond and blue-eyed daughter.
Williams argues that we have accepted a racial essentialism, moulded by centuries-old racist ideas, that harms progress and that we need to turn away. He raises all these questions about whether racial category is necessary (concluding it is not), but leaves you with really no idea what to do about it. How do we get from here to that post-racial haven? It still feels abstract. Despite this, I wouldn’t call his thinking naïve - he fully acknowledges and explores a whole bunch of tensions and challenges, and readily admits he doesn’t have the answers. I see his argument more as a rough outline of a far-off worthy goal that he feels many may not even see as worth pursuing. I’m not left completely convinced it’s worth pursuing. But one doesn’t really have to advocate for the entire eradication of racial category to at least buy his arguments on the potential merit of more ambiguous and less reified classification of people, cultures, subcultures, etc. I don’t know how he or anyone else is going to do this. I could see why if people thought this book’s argument was more relevant to some future millennium, rather than today’s. But, a good read. Just a guy appealing to universal values and fleshing out some hopeful ideas about ‘unlearning race’ for the benefit of humanity, informed by his own life experience - in particular, his time in France and the birth of his white-looking blond and blue-eyed daughter.
May 20, 2020
Brilliant and thought provoking. His language and vocabulary can make his concepts seem out of reach at times. I can see how many would not agree with him, but his rhetoric is persuasive and engaging.
Not a light read 😁
Not a light read 😁
September 16, 2019
Williams did a good job of writing this book. It read easy enough, but I really struggled to finish reading it because Williams contradicted himself several times. I actually agree with his 2 thoughts a) that race isn't real and is simply a man made construct and b) although it isnt real, it still holds social currency. I think anyone can reject a racial label but will that act free them from how they are treated in a society transfixed on race. Will it improve "black" people's station financially, in terms of criminal justice, and other oppertunities? He failed to give a solid enough arguement with evidence to convince me it would beyond his own story. One man's story can not stand a rule for everyone else, especially when most people may not stand in his place on the scale of colorism and financial resource. Class plays a part that he neglected digging into enough.
That's for the ARC
That's for the ARC
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 11, 2020
I rarely read memoirs by young people; I find the wisdom that comes with age more sharply focuses the memory on what’s essential while at the same time softening the passions of youth. I’m very glad I made an exception in this case.
SELF PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE reveals a young writer with exceptional insight into the issues of race and society, along with a fearless self-awareness.
Mr. Williams asks difficult questions about the very nature of race and whether it has a role in our modern world. He posits that race is becoming less important as our knowledge of genetics increases, and even introduces (to me) the concept that one can refuse to play the game and no longer define oneself in racial terms.
In the end this is an optimistic work that reinforced my belief that we (humanity) will eventually grow out of this particular fault, whether by evolving past viewing each other through the lens of race, or by growing closer to each other as our races continue to combine.
SELF PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE reveals a young writer with exceptional insight into the issues of race and society, along with a fearless self-awareness.
Mr. Williams asks difficult questions about the very nature of race and whether it has a role in our modern world. He posits that race is becoming less important as our knowledge of genetics increases, and even introduces (to me) the concept that one can refuse to play the game and no longer define oneself in racial terms.
In the end this is an optimistic work that reinforced my belief that we (humanity) will eventually grow out of this particular fault, whether by evolving past viewing each other through the lens of race, or by growing closer to each other as our races continue to combine.
October 16, 2019
Felt like a long navel-gazing essay to me
A short interesting read but maybe I'm not the target audience because it felt like a lot of wrestling with confusion about identity rather than insights.
A short interesting read but maybe I'm not the target audience because it felt like a lot of wrestling with confusion about identity rather than insights.
October 19, 2019
This is a deeply flawed book. The writer should have spoken with more true thinkers, done much more research, and rethought his own biases against black America. It was almost disturbing that anyone would publish this. It was also not very well-written. I cannot recommend it at all.
December 1, 2021
This book articulated a lot that I have felt, thought of, lived, etc but never quite been able to articulate.
This quote, in particular, resonated with me and my experiences growing up as an upper middle class “black” (to borrow the author’s way in which he writes about race):
“There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we’re really talking about is class—or, more accurately still, manners, values, and taste. This is why an older blue-collar Italian friend of my brother’s could tell me foolishly but in all seriousness that my bookish pappy was “whiter” than his own financially secure but uneducated dad; and it’s why a tough black boy I’d met could step inside our tiny house, glance at our shelves and in the cramped kitchen at my blond mother cheerily baking snacks, and declare against all evidence to the contrary, “Man, y’all are rich.”
Highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a different, but I think incredibly important, discussion on what we’ve made race into and how we might unmake our way out of the mess we’ve created.
This quote, in particular, resonated with me and my experiences growing up as an upper middle class “black” (to borrow the author’s way in which he writes about race):
“There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we’re really talking about is class—or, more accurately still, manners, values, and taste. This is why an older blue-collar Italian friend of my brother’s could tell me foolishly but in all seriousness that my bookish pappy was “whiter” than his own financially secure but uneducated dad; and it’s why a tough black boy I’d met could step inside our tiny house, glance at our shelves and in the cramped kitchen at my blond mother cheerily baking snacks, and declare against all evidence to the contrary, “Man, y’all are rich.”
Highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a different, but I think incredibly important, discussion on what we’ve made race into and how we might unmake our way out of the mess we’ve created.
October 19, 2019
His previous book, Losing My Cool was such an engaging and easy read, probably because it stayed close to the surface of the issue, and because it had me rooting for, and admiring decisions of the author's younger incarnation.
This one, though, is a far more introspective and studious approach to the questions of race in America. It looks at the cruelty and unfairness of the racial divides, and the nebulousness of the belief that it is possible to delineate where, along that black-to-white continuum, the black part stops and the white part begins.
This one, though, is a far more introspective and studious approach to the questions of race in America. It looks at the cruelty and unfairness of the racial divides, and the nebulousness of the belief that it is possible to delineate where, along that black-to-white continuum, the black part stops and the white part begins.
January 7, 2020
Really loved the book. A great writer with a background in philosophy speaks about race and racism, in very personal ways and also in a broad view of where we all are, where we have been, and where we might be able to go. I found it inspiring and I admire his bravery.
June 19, 2020
A personal story that provides more insights than someone who hates 'anecdotal evidence' might think.
December 18, 2022
I liked it it was engaging enough. I didn't love it however. I felt like it was a big dump of information, feeling, and explanations. The content was good and it was nice to see how Williams navigated and is continuing to navigate his identity in regards to race but i feel like smaller chapters would have been beneficial for holding attention.
July 21, 2020
Williams walks through a minefield in this memoir and helps me think through some of the most complex questions over race.
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