Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

We know that the Roman playwright Terence observed, “I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me.”

I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day; I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.

The genes I share with my father, which have kinked my hair and tinted my skin, do not carry within them a set of prescribed behaviors.

Truer words om race have never been spoken.

“black” meant understanding yourself on one level, as everyone does, simply as yourself, but on another level, “always looking at one’s self through the eyes” of whites, and in turn “measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt.”

She was not mixed so much as tripled—fully an Italian woman who was also wholly Nigerian and ultimately entirely American.

our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite, between the face we see in the mirror and the image recognized by the people and institutions that happen to surround us.

That book amounted to a life-changing reading event for me, as well as further evidence of the possibility that a total stranger who checks none of the same identity boxes you do can nonetheless articulate your most ineffable aspirations and inner states more clearly than even your closest kin.

And yet, I would be a fool not to think that my wife’s hair—and especially her eyes—does continue to carry more value in our society than mine. This is why strangers, almost always well intentioned, would stop us on the street to exclaim, Ooh la la, les beaux yeux bleus! when they saw our infant daughter. In retrospect, it is why my high school best friend Charles took to wearing colored contacts for a spell, and if I am honest, it is why even I found myself wondering inordinately, before she was born, whether or not Marlow would have Cleaver’s coveted “blue eyes of death.” But this is precisely the kind of bias it is in my power to, and that I must, reject—while being mindful not to fall into the trap of resentment—for it is with such minor and arbitrary preferences that entire worldviews are sustained.

genuine liberty, inner, mental freedom, is never something another person can give to you but rather something hard-won that anyone interested will eventually have to take for herself, will have to seize with conviction, if she will have it at all.