Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

I shut myself and wept like all the other newborns on the floor. I mean newborn literally. Along with the litany of universal realizations—of new and daunting responsibilities, of advancing age—I was aware, too, however vaguely, that whatever personal identity I had previously inhabited, I had now crossed into something new and different.

Pappy, whose own grandfather was born in the final year of chattel slavery, nonetheless leveraged an education to leapfrog several generations and get us into the kind of middle-class environment my brother and I were able to believe was normal.

Parenthood changes everyone, but looking back on it now, I can say without exaggeration that I walked into the delivery room as one person and came out an altogether different man.

I have begun to acknowledge—to myself mostly, but more and more when others ask—that what I have proximity to is, in fact, neither whiteness nor blackness in the abstract but actual family and friends, which is to say real flesh-and-blood people, of different hues and heritages, nothing more or less.

I don’t know if I can ever attain—or should want to attain—a state where I do not notice the various ethnic and social differences among us, but I have already ceased to allow those differences to dominate and determine the exchange.