Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.” George Orwell said that.

The Nazis were famously inspired by the practices of Southern whites, and it shows.

he was not strong enough to shield—not fully—his sons from the psychological warfare of American racism that whispers obscenities at little boys when they find themselves alone.

There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we’re really talking about is class—or, more accurately still, manners, values, and taste.

My mother was not looking at a “black” man and a “white” woman standing there in her kitchen, as her own mother must have been doing some decades prior. She was really looking at two freelance writers, one American and one French, who could certainly use an easier environment to do all sorts of mundane, non-racialized things like secure affordable health and child care and find rent-stabilized space in which to live and work.

Even as I share their outrage, even as I remain aware that this could still happen to me, I know as well as I know my own name that this is not one of the things I need fear could happen to Marlow. How can I deny that there is a part of me—a real one—that feels relieved; and how could this relief in turn not look a lot like treason?

I’ve been granted a view that most Americans on either side of the color line haven’t had, but from a position that an increasing number will find themselves in as the mixed-race population expands. And while I’ve benefited from this view, it is true that it has come at a price—namely the terrible realization that so many people are unreachable and won’t allow themselves to be reached—which is perhaps never more acutely felt than when I am privy to the mechanics of what for want of a better term I’ll call the privilege to be oblivious.

She does not “hate black people,” I am fairly certain of this, but what is more chilling to me is the extent to which she lacks the mental bandwidth or desire to think very hard about experiences that differ even slightly from her own. Nothing about the way her life is set up forces or even incentivizes her to do it. This is the greatest obstacle to mutual understanding on a mass scale—and it is not a strictly white problem by any means.

There are many racists, and we know this. In addition to the outright bigots, there are also many lazy white people like my cousin who may never be able to think hard enough about their own blind spots to become good-faith partners in any transformational exchange.

“Just found a new app that tells you which one of your friends are racist. It’s called Facebook.”

An even simpler analogy for race might just be currency: since we have left the gold standard, we all accept on one level that money is nothing but an abstraction, yet who would deny that the consequences of our collective credence in it are as real as gravity or cancer? If race is like money, then whiteness has been seen as the crispest hundred-dollar bill.

The party at fault for a wrong is not necessarily the party best situated to address and heal it.