“I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it,” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose African American father grew up in segregated Texas, has vowed. “There are not fundamentally, inherently, essentially, Black or white lives. There is human life, and we have different ethnicities and cultural traditions, but we have to abolish the idea of race, full stop, or we’re always going to have the residue of racism.”
