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"A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics. 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 multigenerational 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 I have come to believe that I am no longer black or that my daughter is white,' Williams writes. 'It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of us.' Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time"--… (more)
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A contemplation, a memoir, but overall an indictment, of race -not racism, not race-because-people-think-race-is-real, but race itself- couched in and springing from William's having "white" (or
It may sound crazy to say it, here in late 2020, with Trump still in the running for a second term, with police shootings and Black Lives Matter firmly in the zeitgeist, with Twitter frenzies and blasts and counter-blasts from e.g. the NYT opinion pages about cancel culture, wokeness, White privilege, and all the rest... but, maybe the time is about to right for something like the message here. Not colorblindness, not Identity Uber Alles, not wokeness, not reaction, but a hard look at racism and race, and an imminently reasonable question (Williams puts it so much better): Why the fuck are we still doing race, indeed actively enforcing race on people (anywhere, but not least as part of "anti-racism"?)