The American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams is racially ambiguous enough to be mistaken as Algerian in Paris, where he and his French wife are raising two children, their heads capped with airy blond curls.
It was the birth of his daughter, Marlow, six years ago, that set off a panic in him. What did it mean that he, then a self-identified black man who had always accepted the black/white binary, had a child who would be perceived as white?
At first, it meant he would apply camera filters to darken her skin – to make her belong, to him and to a race. Eventually, it meant asking questions complex enough to alter how he identifies himself now: what does it mean to belong to a race, part of which for black people can include “an allegiance to pain”? And why would passing that down to his daughter make her black?
In his second book, out Tuesday, Self-Portrait in Black and White, he calls for us to consider why we uphold race categories defined “using plantation logic” and encourages us to do away with the arbitrary nomenclature altogether. Not to be confused with the term “post-race”, he suggests “retiring from race”, “transcending race”, “unlearning race”. It’s a big ask, he admits.
Because both of us are mixed-race people who grew up with one black parent and one white parent, Chatterton Williams thinks he and I have a head start on dismissing the barriers of race. We both remember the first time we were “raced” by a stranger and simultaneously separated from our white parent, and setting out from then on to continually contemplate race in our respective lives. For him, this has come to mean examining the artificiality of it.
On the campus of Bard College, a private arts college upstate New York where he taught a four-week course, Can we retire from race?, this fall, we discussed the privilege of proximity to whiteness, whether it is asking too much of black people to let go of race while retaining the pride of an identity forged in the face of systematic oppression and, finally, why he’s optimistic norms can change.
Summer Sewell: After six years of examining race categories, you’ve come to identify as an ex-black man. If you’re ex-black, what are you now?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: I try to find more specific ways of identifying myself. So I would say I’m American. I’m descended from southern slaves, and I’m descended on my mother’s side from northern European Protestant immigrants. I don’t mean that I’m a white man.
Right. You say you didn’t become ex-black because you’d ceased loving what I’ve been taught to call ‘black’, or because you wished for your daughter to blend in to what you’d been taught to call ‘white’. You don’t want to push her into identifying as white, obviously.
That would be the worst-case scenario. If she just walked around as a kind of entitled white girl, that would be a failure: a parental failure, a family-wide failure.
You say you can reject those terms because they don’t fully encapsulate who you and your daughter are as people. But don’t we already know that?
No. Not everybody.
Maybe it’s because I’m mixed or because I think about race so much, but when people say that they’re black, I don’t just attribute traits to them.
I think that you and I would be probably outside of the norm.
Over the course of writing the book, and also while doing a long reported piece for the New Yorker and interviewing some real racists, I really moved away from the, “Oh God. What have I done? I’ve killed the blackness in my family,” and more to, “This is fucked up. We’re not going to solve that.”
It was really talking with the racists that I realized we’re not going to actually transcend racism so long as we believe in these categories. So long as those categories are upheld, whether it’s by the right or the left, there are people that draw conclusions that you, Summer, don’t draw from these categories.
Do you think that lighter-skinned black people, and especially mixed people like us, have some privilege in even entertaining the idea of “unlearning race”? Wouldn’t it be harder for darker-skinned black people?
I think it’s easier for people who are mixed or ambiguous in some way, but I was really inspired by this guy, Kmele Foster, who calls himself a race abolitionist. He would say that he’s a bunch of different things … He’s very dark-skinned, and he just refuses to identify with the term “black”. He thinks it’s unhelpful. I agree with him on that and some people do laugh at him about it, he has this kind of confidence about him that I think is maybe a big ask for a lot of people.
You have a bit of history with Ta-Nehisi Coates …
I’ve written a lot about him.
And you’ve said that he pushes white supremacy.
No, he doesn’t push it, but I think that he sees whiteness as special, which I think actually reinforces some of the very things that I know he wants to counteract. So what I mean by that is, white supremacists also think they’re special. They don’t disagree. And Coates is also ambivalent and contradictory about whether blackness is an essence or whether it’s fake.
In his book Between the World and Me, there’s this passage: ‘Perhaps being named ‘black’ was just someone’s name for being at the bottom … There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood.’ That all sounds similar to what you’re talking about.
That’s exactly what I would say. But he has it kind of both ways. In his critique of Kanye West, I thought that he got into basically saying that Kanye West is an inauthentic, artificial black man ... that he had lost some blackness, which I think is a very dangerous thing to say because it’s basically saying …
There’s a certain way to be black.
Yeah. And that there are people who will decide that and judge that.
You also say in your book that Coates has a pessimistic view. You describe a scene from his book where a white woman pushes his son and he reacts, people may say, aggressively, and is like, ‘This is blatantly racist and … ’
And he said he brought centuries of history into the encounter.
Yeah. You write he overreacted and made no room for it to be just this crazy woman who had a bad day. That’s all his pessimism, right? So then is your unlearning race idea optimistic?
I think you have to be an optimist. I want to say that I’m almost paraphrasing James Baldwin verbatim to say that you have no choice but to be an optimist, so long as you’re alive and you’re writing and you’re trying to have a better world. And as a parent, I would say that I have no choice but to be an optimist. I use the word naive in the book. I think that children have a way of thinking about race that is much healthier. If I asked Marlow to describe you, she will be like, “Summer’s wearing a beige jacket. That’s the main difference between her and the girl in the pink shirt,” literally.
I think that I would like to reclaim some of that naivety and I have to be optimistic to believe that the world could be otherwise. If I were pessimistic, I don’t see how I could write. You know? Because you have to believe that you’re reaching somebody.
You write in the book that when you see your white friends post on Facebook that they’re sorry that they’re white ...
Yeah. Atoning for it.
Do white people have to do this atoning either in a performative way or real way for us to move past race?
White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else’s.
Black people have always been in race. We’ve never been outside of it, but it’s not a black subject. That’s why I get frustrated when people ask, “Who would you like to speak about [your book] with on the panel? Who should review it?” It’s like, this is not a black book. It’s not not a black book. I’m talking about a lot of black stuff in here, but I should be talking about this with Asian people, I should be able to have a Latino interlocutor, I should be able to have a white interlocutor because this is not a subject that only people of color are supposed to be talking about while whites are just in the audience.
Who I want to be talking about this with is anybody whose race has been made in America, which is all people.
You used a metaphor in the book about a woman who gets hit by a car and, no matter what the driver can do to help, pay her medical bills or whatever, it’s up to her to heal herself. Is that what black people have to do to unlearn race?
I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn’t real, race isn’t real. I’ve been socially deemed black in America, and this is a category that’s been hurting my family for generations and that has also led to extraordinary cultural contributions that I’m very proud of, but it’s not a real category and our society is damaged by insisting on it.
How do we hold on to these contributions that the world would be so much more boring, among other things, if it weren’t for black people? How do we hold on to those and also let go of our race?
I think I do it every day. I still go home and I’ll listen to Gunna or Lil Baby and that’ll feel culturally relevant to me. I’ll listen to John Coltrane. I’ll see something that’s familiar to me in even black British writer like Zadie Smith or I’ll look at Kerry James Marshall paintings and I’ll notice his blackness there, but I don’t think I have to believe it’s a biological reality. There was a community of people that went through certain experiences and circumstances over the course of a period of time in the new world and they created cultural traditions that many people who look like them upheld.
What do you think is the main criticism you’re going to get from the book, and from black people, specifically?
The worst criticism would be silence, which is an absolute nightmare when you work so hard and think so seriously about a question. When people won’t touch it, that’s the writer’s fear.
But I think that a criticism, I’m sure, will come my way and it’s probably the black criticism. People think that I married into whiteness and now live comfortably in Paris and don’t interact with black problems, even though reality is always more complicated than how it seems. I’ve seen it in the comments of the New York Times excerpt of the book, because there’s pictures of me and my family, and commenters were like, “His kids are white and he’s a very light-skinned black man with a white wife. He made the decision to have a white wife.” There’s a kind of dismissiveness that, I think, doesn’t take seriously what I’m trying to work at.
If I were writing this book, my worry would be, ‘They’re going to think I’m a sellout. They’re going to think I’m giving white people a pass by just saying, “Fuck all that. Let’s just move past all of this.”’
Yeah. I mean, I mention it a bit in the book. I try to make this point … If you’re at an impasse when you’re trying to get by somebody and then you both keep moving, somebody’s got to move first or not move first. Somebody’s got to stop and so the other person goes around.
I think we’re at a kind of impasse that we are obsessed with. We’re really looking backward. I don’t think it’s wrong to look backward, but I’m also trying to look forward and imagine another way. And maybe, it’s another wrinkle in the story of blacks in America. Black people are also the people that will ...
Forgive.
Yeah. Maybe that’s not fair and I would still ask that if that was the case, because I think that the reward for everyone, including blacks. I don’t think this idea that white people get rewarded, too, ruins the prize of a better future, if black people also get the better future. You know what I mean? I’m not just into keeping white people on the hook and retribution. Should there be some reparation? Probably. Has there been some reparation? For some blacks, there has been reparation. Does there need to be more? I thought that the most convincing and really spectacular piece of writing was Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations.
It’s the definitive piece, yeah.
I love that piece. I don’t think that that’s contradictory to wanting to get past, too, and to losing the pessimism. I think that white people are going to have to do a hell of a lot, but if black people show leadership on this issue, it almost seems like it might be fitting. And people will be like, “Well, yeah. But we’re not here to do the labor or to teach you to do your work,” but what are you here for? We want a better world. What are you here for? I think that’s very admirable work, actually. You know?