Beyond the Color-Line

“[T]he problem of the twentieth century,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “is the problem of the color-line.” More than a century later, the color-line persists, weighing on the American psyche and presenting much the same challenge it did in Du Bois’s time.

Or does it? Over the past decade, a new generation of black writers has sought to challenge the immutability of racism—and, indeed, of race itself. One of the most prominent members of this cohort is Thomas Chatterton Williams, a former New America fellow and author of the new memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White.

Self-Portrait begins with the birth of Williams’s first child, who, to her father’s surprise, emerges fair-skinned, blonde, and blue-eyed. Her appearance upends Williams’s assumptions about race, resulting, ultimately, in his rejection of “the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.”

Throughout the text, Williams prods inherited notions of race and racism, which, he argues, represent an error of perception. I interviewed him this past December to discuss his repudiation of contemporary racial discourse—and what it would mean to collectively “unlearn” race as a society.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

In your prologue, you write, “A certain degree of naïveté is what is needed most if we are ever to solve the tragedy of racism in the absence of human races.” What do you consider to be the essence of this “naïveté”? Beyond verbal disavowals, how do you envision individuals practicing racelessness in daily life?

There are a couple of things at play here. First, I take seriously Adrian Piper’s assertion that, whatever else it may be, racism (and xenophobia) is first and foremost interpersonal. It starts on the level of the individual. And what this means, in practice, is that racism is an error of perception: One does not see the person, the individual in all her complexity and singularity and contradiction, standing before them—one sees a stereotype, a myth. Yet this is not an error children are prone to make. Children have not learned to fall into these perceptive traps.

Second, there has been significant psychological research—notably, a 2001 study by Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides—concerning the degree to which race can be “unlearned.” The results are highly optimistic. These scholars find there is no cognitive reason it can’t be, which is to say that "no part of the human cognitive architecture is designed specifically to encode race." Race is essentially a shorthand for almost all of us when we try to quickly figure out coalitions. But it could be otherwise, and in hypothetical "social worlds where the active coalitions are easy to encode and do not track race—even briefly—encoding by race decreases.”

So, what can individuals do? I think we can start by consciously striving to conceive of ourselves along alternate lines. Just the act of consciously pushing back against that inner voice, that learned reflex to use physical characteristics as shorthand for so much else, would already go a long way.

Your emphasis on the interpersonal as the key driver of racism is very interesting to me. Thinkers as various as Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin have made compelling arguments for how oppressive systems can function in the absence of personal animus or bigotry. In our contemporary moment, this leads me to think of someone like Jeff Sessions, who has an Asian-American granddaughter he presumably loves—but who has also spent his career pushing laws that, many argue, disproportionately harm people of color. I agree that many, if not most of us, yearn to root out our internal biases and bigotries—but how do we address structural economic and political incentives to maintain and enforce racism?

In the book, I try to address just this conundrum through the figure of my young, “white," Trump-supporting cousin in California, whom I refer to as Hope. Hope is full of all kinds of biases and blindnesses, but she believes that because she counts—and would even say she loves—various family members of other “races,” she is impervious to racism. Mixing alone will never do all the work of transcending racism, because people are able to live with all kinds of contradictions.

My point is that the personal matters, and I find Adrian Piper compelling here—all institutions and systems are made up of individuals, when you get down to it. The example of Sessions or my cousin or Mitch McConnell, who also has an Asian wife, do not inspire optimism for the simple fact that being related to or even in romantic relationships with individuals of another “race” does not require much. Thomas Jefferson very well may have loved Sally Hemings.

I believe that overcoming racism through the interpersonal is possible—and that gradual normative change can alter structures and systems—but it will require much more than mere proximity. It will require what I describe in the book as working towards an achieved perspective. One would have to really unlearn the racecraft that shapes our collective reality, and cease to believe in one’s own “whiteness"—not merely make exceptions for the odd minority.

Throughout Self-Portrait, you highlight your resistance to collective affiliations. However, some collective affiliations (e.g., with writers and thinkers, or with your own family members) are treated as healthy and even ennobling in your book, while others—most obviously, race—are described as having the opposite effect. Can you elaborate on your vision of the relationship between the individual and their community? What distinguishes nourishing or constructive forms of affiliation from those that might be harmful?

Of course, we all need community, but I think that—with the exception of family, which is not chosen but is usually small and unique enough to be manageable—affiliation that is chosen, that is elective and emerges out of the process of healthy self-creation, is fundamentally of a different nature from any abstract categorization that is imposed from without. The former celebrates autonomy, while the latter can squash it. What on earth is something so large and multifaceted as the “white” community?

My personal understanding of blackness, and that of many of my peers, is very much rooted in the sort of radical, emancipatory self-definition you seem to extol. Do you grant that there might be ways of understanding racial community that are neither abstract nor externally derived?

There are certainly ways of understanding community this way, especially the “black” community. My argument would be that there is nothing “racial” about this, and the sooner we discard that damaged, gratuitous word (and the distorted and distorting concepts that undergird it), the healthier our sense of ourselves and each other will be.

With the exception of Racecraft and a footnote referencing the work of Nell Irvin Painter, your book largely avoids citing contemporary and historical scholarship on race. What is your relationship to this body of knowledge, and how did it shape your thinking on race?

This was a conscious decision. I was deeply inspired by the women you mention, as well as the British thinker Paul Gilroy. Reading these thinkers and others shaped and changed my thinking profoundly, but it was really the experience of living the contradictions of race that made me abandon belief in the construct entirely. So, my feeling was that this book would take some of these ideas and try to make them as urgent and vivid as I could by narrating them through my own, admittedly unusual, life experiences and observations.

At one point in the book, you describe a racist object in the home of your wife’s grandmother—and your own ultimately detached response to it. What form of redress is owed by white people, especially those we trust to care for us? How should they contribute on an individual basis to the work of undoing racism?

This is my wife’s 90-year-old grandmother-in-law. She’s a lovely lady, and like all of us, she’s been profoundly shaped by the epoch and culture she was reared in. She grew up in a France that was a colonial power, and there are markers of this domination that wouldn’t ever—or would be very difficult to—strike her as problematic. These symbols are a part of the visual architecture of her world, and I do not think it’s my responsibility or duty to force her to see them as I do.

What I do think she has to do, if we are to be family and interact, is treat me with dignity and respect—and she must extend this to my family and to anyone else we encounter. And she has always done this, and I would say that she genuinely loves me and my children.

So, to answer the question, I do not feel that she owes me any redress beyond that. As far as I’m concerned, this is how she’s faced up to and confronted and transcended whatever racism she may have inherited. I know that time cannot solve the racial problem without our efforts, but I’m also aware that the object—a servile-looking servant’s bust in porcelain—will not be valued by the next generations. For me, that solves that specific problem.

Having lived abroad for several years, how do imperialism and colonialism factor into your considerations of race?

Living in Europe, I’m profoundly aware that the colonial history is as pervasive as it is significant. There are enormous differences between a black American’s experience in, say, France and a phenotypically similar member of a formerly colonized society. This is partially why I believe it’s so important for us to be clear about what we are actually talking about when we fall back on the language of race. It is almost always far more complicated blood and skin and genes.

Several passages in Self-Portrait employ pernicious stereotypes of black people (for instance, the myth of black youth being emotionally hardened and physically older than their years). That strikes me as an odd choice, considering your book’s central argument against racial essentialism—although, as you point out several times, we’ve all enacted racism at one point or another, regardless of our backgrounds. How have you tried to address manifestations of racism in yourself and your own thinking? To whom do you feel accountable?

I believe the passages you refer to convey the racist beliefs that my black peers and I absorbed and reproduced about ourselves and our romantic partners. The purpose was not to validate the stereotypes, but to attempt to relay how common they are and, on my part, to untangle the racial from the class-based behavior—to show how we often use racial language to make classist generalizations. I feel accountable to myself to refuse to slip into racial thinking, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a consistent struggle. This is not easy, what I’m asking. Unlearning our racial habits and reflexes is a rigorous, lifelong process. But I’m convinced the effort is worth it.