Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

Brazil, for example, a drop of “white blood” makes someone not-black.*

But what does it say about us that the most common means we have to describe ourselves rely on categories that do not and cannot manifest on human flesh? John Locke observed that categories “are made by the mind and not by nature”; how indeed can you learn to look at yourself in the mirror and actually see what’s there without the background noise of prejudice and myth?

“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.” George Orwell said that. “Black,” “white,” “mixed,” “person of color” . . . all of us live under the weight of these labels—even those of us whose existence can’t help but defy them. In color theory, there is no such thing as white—it exists solely in our perception of the world, not as a color per se but as the absence of such.

I want to say that I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it. And it is a game, not in the sense of entertainment but in the sense of game theory—a veritable prisoner’s dilemma in which we are all trapped though highly unlikely to escape, since self-interest mixed with ignorance of each other’s intentions practically ensures we make the wrong decision.

observed, “I

am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me.”

With the publication of Systema Naturae, in 1735, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist and “father of modern taxonomy,” fatefully split mankind into four color-coded strands, Europaeus albus, Americanus rubescens, Asiaticus fuscus, Africanus niger; later, the German naturalist, “father of anthropology,” and coiner of that confused and confusing term “Caucasian,”# Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, would have us be five, the aforementioned “Caucasian” (white), “Mongolian” (yellow), “Malayan” (brown), “Ethiopian” (black), and “American” (red),

The truth is that ideas matter. Our language, formal and informal alike, shapes our reality. The terminology we use and accept to be used matters. The images we make and allow to be made of ourselves matter, as do the narratives we recite in order to tell ourselves, and each other, who we are, where we come from, and where we think we are going. If we

really want to repair what is wrong in our society, it is going to require not just new policies or even new behaviors, but nothing less heroic than new ideas.

“While social repair does not happen at scale,” as the columnist David Brooks has argued, “it happens in rooms one by one and those things build up an...

regard: A certain degree of naïveté 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.

“Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.”

Life was difficult in the way that lifting weights is—tension causes growth—which is to say it was rewardingly purposive. This was not New Jersey, nor was it even that cosmopolitan corner of Brooklyn I’d gotten used to, where career-minded young writers sit around and nervously compare agents and bylines until everyone is riddled with envy and anxiety;

Every movie, book, and conversation was potentially transformative, and I had hungered for new experiences. My expanding sense of myself and my place in the world happened to coincide with an extraordinary American political moment. When I returned to New York, I put my things in storage, moved to my friend Josh’s couch, and volunteered to canvass for the Obama campaign in Philadelphia.

You don’t want to make Yacub’s little white devils, now, do you?—into forfeiting my own personal happiness and volition. What kind of liberation is that? I’d marry this woman I wanted to marry, I told myself, and all the rest was distraction.

person can never be reduced to a constellation of ideas or an intellectual stance, and I realize now that I had failed to extend to these men the same ambiguity in motive and taste I’ve grown accustomed to allowing for myself.

Or is it possible that one of the most powerful and subversive ways—whether done purposely or not—to combat a racist society is simply to bow out of its perverse customs and mores, rejecting its false boundaries even as they work tirelessly to claim you?

“the only way to deal with an unfree world,” as Camus ventured, “to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion”?

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.

It doesn’t seem to strike him that as long as black people can be

so easily triggered and provoked—so long as such barely submerged ancestral pain hovers just beneath the surface—we’ll never be free or equal.

“One can react defensively and angrily, and distill the encounter into slow-burning fuel for one’s racist stereotypes. Or one can detach oneself emotionally and distance oneself physically from the aggressors, from the perspective of which their personal flaws and failures of vision, insight and sensitivity loom larger, making it easier to forgive them for their human imperfections but harder to relate to them as equals.”

“Woke” anti-racism proceeds from the premise that race is real—if not biological, then socially constructed and therefore equally if not more significant still—putting it in sync with toxic presumptions of white supremacism that would also like to insist on the fundamentality of racial difference.

Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many anti-racists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed and determinative, and almost supernatural in scope. This way of thinking about human difference is seductive for many reasons but it has failed us.

But I am convinced that we will never be able to outwit such complicated and tenacious pathologies with the stale and deficient mental habits that produced them in the first place.

We can simultaneously resist bigotry and imagine a society that has outgrown the identities it preys on.

“world profoundly fissured by nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender,” the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who happens to be black, has written. “And the only way to transcend those divisions—to forge, for once, a civic culture that respects both differences and commonalities—is through education that seeks to comprehend the diversity of human culture.”

I know it’s not fashionable today to call yourself an existentialist, but that is what I am, to the extent that I start from the premise that, though forces beyond my control influence and pressure and certainly constrict me, I am ultimately responsible for my own beliefs and actions.

“The great American philosopher Charles Peirce argued that a belief that cannot be consistently acted on cannot be true.”

We can also choose to expand our vision of ourselves, and bring about a fuller rendering of our common, complex human condition.

It is my hope that as many people as possible, of all skin tones and hair textures, will come to turn away from the racial delusion. But I don’t think it would be unfitting in the least for blacks to take the lead here.