Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics. Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. More Details Original Title.
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Be the first to ask a question about Self-Portrait in Black and White. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Oct 28, Bruce Katz rated it liked it Shelves: race-in-america , non-fiction. I wanted to like this book more than I did. The author is obviously intelligent, thoughtful, and -- judging by the character of his "voice" -- kind. And I truly would love to sit down and talk with him over beer or wine particularly since he lives in Paris.
But the book frustrated me enormously. Williams starts from the premise that "race" is not, biologically speaking, real. Nor is it entirely a social construct. Moreover, he points out that words like Black and White cover so many variations I wanted to like this book more than I did.
Moreover, he points out that words like Black and White cover so many variations of complexion as to be entirely meaningless. I concur on all of these things. What I found myself having trouble with was where he goes from here. In essence, his book is a plea that people no longer think or act in terms of something called Race, either with others or themselves. A worthy vision, to be sure, but I have the same difficulty with this as I do with friends and relatives who express agitated bewilderment that Democrats and Republicans in Congress don't just put aside their emotions and sit down and reason together.
Yes -- a hundred times yes -- but the world doesn't work that way. Williams is the product of a mixed race household and a graduate of highly respected universities. He is himself, as he says, light-skinned though he has self-identified as black. His wife is white: blonde hair, blue eyes, fair-complected. They live, as I noted above, in Paris. What set his thinking about the book in motion was the birth of his first child: a daughter with blonde hair and blue eyes.
Does he -- can he -- see any part of himself in her? Is it reasonable or even rational to think about this child and her future in racial terms?
But the path he takes from here is I don't want to say it's naive, because frankly that would be dismissive. But he'll write things like this: Pappy [his father] vigilantly raised me to brace myself for the challenges of being seen as a black man in America But even in the worst situations, these have hardly every been mine. To my knowledge, in my adult life, I've never been harmed by my appearance or lineage, people don't cross the street when I approach, and the sole instance I've ever been pulled over in a car, I was speeding and I'll leave it at that.
Yes, he's had some experience with discrimination, and he's all too aware that his experiences are not at all representative. And yet Immediately after this admission, he writes with, I believe, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me," who he takes to task for his red-hot anger, in mind , " Virtually all of our most audible voices on race, today more than ever, in establishing identity solely in 'the body' -- no matter in how positive, persuasive, or righteously indignant a light -- actually reinforce the same racist habits of thought they claim to wish to defeat.
Lest anyone make too little of this point, he says that he's not speaking rhetorically but literally. He turns to Black Lives Matter as an example. He absolutely shares their aims, Yet its very framing -- the notion that some lives are essentially black while others are white -- is both politically true in a specific sense and, in a broader way, philosophically inadequate.
I honestly don't know how to react to this. I think I understand the point he's trying to make, but "philosophically inadequate" isn't much protection from reality. Chatterton Williams is not oblivious to any of this. He writes, " At a time when, despite all of the tremendous societal progress, blackness -- certainly not always but especially at that vexed intersection with poverty or the cultural signifiers of such -- is still subject to all manner of violation and disrespect; at a time when people perceived as black continue to be stopped, frisked, stalked, harassed, choked-out, and drilled with bullets in broad daylight and left to bake in the street -- what does it mean to have escaped a fate?
Put baldly, what is proximity to the idea of whiteness worth and what does color cost? And the reverse? I guess in the end my reaction to the book is, as I said, one of frustration more than anything else. And I suppose there may be a reasonable objection made about my making judgments from the perspective of a 70 year old, financially secure, white male living in the DC metropolitan area.
Late in the book he writes of coming to see himself as "an ex-black man. A worthy ideal, absolutely. But not, I fear, of much value in the world that I see and read about. I look forward to reading what others think.
View all 18 comments. Feb 04, Barbara rated it it was amazing. Shouldn't "racially transcendent humanism" be superior to tribal labeling? While we should appreciate the social barriers overcome by our ancestors, we shouldn't be defined by it. Likewise, we shouldn't be burdened by guilt due to atrocities done by our racial group in the past.
Williams meticulously explores these questions and many other relevant race labeling issues. The author writes from the heart. Born to a white mother and a black father he always identified himself as black. When his French caucasian wife gave birth to two blond, blue eyed babies, Williams began to question the racial identification problems.
How would his children be identified? Should they feel "black pride"? I have done plenty of thinking about race, bigotry, and injustices but Williams explores ideas I have really not thought about. He is honest and fair in his assessments. I wholeheartedly hope his vision for the future is possible. It just seems that at this time of divisiveness, open anti-Semitism, and racism that dream is not around the corner. I strongly recommend this book.
People will always look different from each other in ways we can't control. What we can control is what we allow ourselves to make of those differences. View all 6 comments.
Feb 03, Eilonwy rated it really liked it Shelves: beautifully-written , heartbreaking , heartwarming , deeply-thoughtful , non-fiction. We must always be on the side that celebrates and cultivates variety, accepting without fetishizing difference. The catchy summary would be: Famalay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay!
We doh see skin We doh see colour We see strength We see power We doh see race One or di other Once he is breathing on this earth he is my brother I found myself singing this song every time I picked this book up. This is a deeply personal, philosophical, and thought-provoking book. And even as he wishes for true colorblindness, he worries about just sweeping away the historic horrors of being Black in the United States.
His daughter joined now by a baby brother is the descendant of slaves -- but what does that mean when she is growing up as a white French girl? But thinking about it is hard and worthwhile work. The most optimistic portions of this book are when TCW describes his friends and family getting together for various events, and all the complexions and experiences they include.
And maybe the country will finally become safer for its dark-skinned citizens. And more just. Until then, soca can lead the way.
Because all us humans are famalay-lay-lay, no matter how much some people want to resist seeing or acknowledging it. And I applaud Thomas Chatterton Williams for trying to illustrate that truth so personally and poignantly.
View 1 comment. Jul 05, Steve rated it it was ok. At times interesting read, more than anything his description of his biracial daughter and his own internal struggles with where his perspective should lie on the role of blackness with his visually white daughter. This could have been an entire journey into itself, given the global expansion of mixed races.
The main arguments border on naive not acknowledging legitimately that society has incentive At times interesting read, more than anything his description of his biracial daughter and his own internal struggles with where his perspective should lie on the role of blackness with his visually white daughter.
Dec 22, Amber rated it it was amazing. I ultimately agree with the authors challenge that we unlearn race but also wish he'd spent more time examining his unique position as a light-skinned mixed race person living outside the U.
Much easier to be "ex-black" in Paris than any city in the U. Fascinating overall. After college, he moved to France, married a French woman, and started a family. Like other American ex-pats, Paris was an existential tabula rasa where he could clean the slate and start over. He has drawn from disparate sources and thought deeply about these topics. This is a smart and measured addition to this topic. View all 4 comments.
Dec 05, Sharon Barrow Wilfong rated it liked it. I have always been fascinated by race: what constitutes race; how do people self-identify; how important is it, and how has it impacted culture and history. Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in a bi-racial home. His mother was a white woman, the daughter of a conservative preacher who attended Wheaton College in Illinois.
His father, a black man, grew up in the South. Williams grew up in the northeast and led, what some would call a privileged upbringing. It sounds to me rather that he grew up i I have always been fascinated by race: what constitutes race; how do people self-identify; how important is it, and how has it impacted culture and history.
It sounds to me rather that he grew up in a household with a father who expected him to succeed and he did. He attended college in New York City and while still a student was offered an advance to publish a book on race. Because I listened to this book on Hoopla, I am unable to refer to specific facts, such as what university he attended and whether it was this book or a previous book he wrote that was published while he was still in college, so for the sake of accuracy, I won't say.
Being a man that considers himself black while not looking black many people, especially in Europe assumed he was an Arab caused Williams, maybe not an identity crisis, but certainly led him on a journey, the fruit of which is this book. What does it mean to be black? Is it cultural? Williams himself married a white French woman. How should their children view themselves?
They look less black than he does. So are they black? What is the "black experience"? The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Already have an account? Log in. Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials. Sign Up. An insightful, indispensable memoir. Pub Date: Oct. Page Count: Publisher: Norton. No Comments Yet. Pub Date: Sept. Page Count: Publisher: Viking. Show comments. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Sign In. TIME Health. TIME Labs. The Goods. TIME Shop.
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