Self-Portrait in Black and White
Unlearning Race
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TIME 'MUST-READ'
'An extraordinarily thought-provoking memoir that makes a controversial contribution to the fraught debate on race and racism . . . intellectually stimulating and compelling' SUNDAY TIMES
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams (Losing My Cool) follows in the footsteps of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates to craft a provocative philosophical argument about the role of race in human identity. He acknowledges during this trio of essays that he has had some highly unusual experiences. "The View From Near and Far" deals with his youth as the light-skinned son of a black father and a white mother; his first trip to France, where many people thought he was of Middle Eastern descent; and his realization that identity is heavily influenced by the way others see a person. "Marrying Out" explores his marriage to a white French woman and how his father conveyed to him that black American life is "conditioned by local historical circumstance... not beholden to it." "Self-Portrait of an Ex-Black Man" leads up to Williams's decision to follow in artist Adrian Piper's footsteps by "retiring" from race. Claiming the uniqueness of the black experience, he argues, is still buying into the racist idea that race is a centrally important facet of identity. The solution, he posits, is to live in "the humanizing specificity" of people as people, not as vessels for historicized prejudice. Regardless of whether readers agree with his conclusions, these essays are intellectually rigorous, written in fluid prose, and frequently exhilarating.
