While [Williams'] Self-Portrait in Black and White begins with assertions of his blackness, it evolves into a rich set of questions occasioned by the birth of his first child ... He rejects the anger endemic to so much current writing about race in America; he is refreshingly free of the punishing though brilliant invective of Ta-Nehisi Coates ... On the whole, Williams’s book is more rigorous than mournful, an account of solutions more than of problems, marked by self-deprecating humor and acute sensitivity ... Williams writes beautifully, but his pages include quotations from great men that sometimes seem like scattered proof of his sophistication, a reflection of insecurities he disavows. Some readers will find his rhetoric perfidious and reactionary, with its dismissal of identity politics and the concomitant particulars of the African-American experience. But he is so honest and fresh in his observations, so skillful at blending his own story with larger principles, that it is hard not to admire him. At a time of increasing division, his philosophizing evinces an underlying generosity. He reaches both ways across the aisle of racism, arguing above all for reciprocity, and in doing so begins to theorize the temperate peace of which all humanity is sorely in need.
... thoughtful yet frustrating ... When he tells his own story, Williams can be an elegant and sharp-eyed writer; when he moves beyond it, he can lapse into an excess of rhetorical questions and ponderous pondering ... In a publishing environment where analyses of race tend to call out white fragilities and catalogue historical injustices, Self-Portrait in Black and White is a counterintuitive, courageous addition. But Williams does not simply want to share his journey; he insists that everyone take the same trip ... Williams is confident that 'people of good will,' anyone 'properly motivated and educated,' can slip the bonds of identity. He concludes this despite constantly noting the uniqueness of his life, which has made his discernment more possible, his choices less constrained, his experience of racial animosity less overt; and he does so seemingly unaware that his plea for individual agency can also involve the agency to accept or embrace group identities, no matter how manufactured or imposed ... his back-and-forth negotiation is indeed endless, making this slim book read longer than its page count ... The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is not always worth reading ... Williams appears to reprimand anyone who recognizes race’s enduring role in American life ... his new ideas can be vague and contradictory when they transcend the self of this self-portrait.
... if you crave a 'fresh' opinion, feel free to open the New York Times—on class, read David Brooks; on gender, read Bari Weiss. And on race, read Thomas Chatterton Williams ... if Losing My Cool had dreamed aloud about a splendid new attitude for black people, his new book—Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, also a memoir—proclaims, with intriguing relief, that the thing we call 'black America' does not, in fact, exist ... In both works, a catastrophic delusion is debunked by our gallant hero. This is the swashbuckling intellectual style of a man born to be Incoherent; after all, Williams was raised by an 'anti-tribal' family that 'did not belong to any collectives,' so his thought is freer and fresher than ours ... Vast chasms in argumentation are spanned by the rickety bridges of TED Talk prose ... Williams has an appetite for aphorism. He opts for a kind of ideological dim sum, plucking thinkers from the sundry platters of politics Left and Right ... in Self-Portrait, class is a stick to beat race with. It brutally trumps identity claims (and is not itself the basis for a thorough critique) ... What he cannot grasp is that any effective challenge to white hegemony would have to take place not in the perfumed realm of private choices and elective affinities, but on the harsh terrain of real life ... The omission reveals the fantasy that throbs beneath this memoir: that race can be yanked from the clanging machinery in which it’s lodged ... Williams attempts to leap through his little trapdoor in history ... What is this book: cynicism or foolishness? A flash of contrarian novelty in a media industry tickled by its own fecklessness—or proof of a truly boundless naïveté?
Williams accuses others of giving whiteness too much value. To strike a balance, he must devalue blackness, without sounding like a neocon or the dreaded self-hater. Parenthood supplies the social magicianship. Williams wants to imagine a burden-free future for his children ... He is full of the magnanimity of protective fatherhood and does not want any of us to be defined by the sordid past ... Thomas Chatterton Williams belongs to this tradition...maybe...he’d rather not be identified with: light-skinned black people who place a value on whiteness; he is kidding himself when he says he doesn't ... Race transcendence is still a crank’s racket, but it is usually offered in the spirit of a gift to humanity. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, this cheerful manifesto of the light-skinned and well placed, carries an atmosphere of gratitude for the acceptance France has promised Williams’s children. He has assured himself that in these times of tattoos, manipulations of the body, gender subversion, transition, transformations of the self, class fantasies, and cultural smugness, not much essentialism remains in definitions of blackness. We are saved already if we but knew it; we are already well, sound, and clear; we have only to recognize it.
The oddly distancing and speculative mode that Williams adopts with regard to his own earlier feelings and motivations is striking. He describes himself wincing at the memory of the op-ed but does not quote from it and attempts no refutation of its argument. The refutation comes in visual form ... [Williams] plays a role of saying what the white person often cannot say ... By the end, he persuades the reader that the world beyond race is an attractive vision while offering scant reason to think that it will arrive anytime soon. But it is a welcome alternative to the daily racial micro-apocalypses that increasingly populate our news feeds.
Williams wants to argue against the American public’s obsession with race...In so doing, however, he denotes very clearly the race and ethnicity of nearly everyone he encounters ... It is an unexpected example of the 'the only way to get over race is to constantly discuss race' tack that 'anti-race' conservatives typically disapprove of in the left...Can someone who has written his only two books on race really claim to have overcome it? ... [Williams] uses his unorthodox biography to support very idiosyncratic ideas, ones that he ultimately wants not to be seen idiosyncratically ... one of the biggest weaknesses with the book: Williams’s perplexing ideas on the nature of interracial marriage ... an elegantly written, pastiche-driven memoir that branches off into tantalizing but not fully explored ideas. If there is a methodological problem, it’s that there is no methodology. Put another way, Williams should have written a more boring book. Rather than quoting Faulkner, Camus, and Orwell, he might’ve quoted the work of contemporary scholars working on understanding and eliminating racial bias ... Nowhere in these pages does Williams give any indication that he is interested in complex questions of identity formation as it crosses with race ... Williams’s book is a polemic and it should have been a case study ... Williams will have to draw more convincing arguments from his very peculiar life.
Self-Portrait wants to be two things at once: a call to arms against the constricting power of race as an identity, which Williams calls a 'philosophical and imaginative disaster,' as well as a follow-up to his 2010 memoir, Losing My Cool. As such, the new book discusses his incredibly specific cultural background and intellectual development and attempts to sort through the questions that his biography raises, questions that cannot be easily generalized to fit other people’s experiences ... while Self-Portrait can be deeply felt and full of introspective insight, it is also a myopic self-involved affair that often ignores important past and present discussions around race, including the genre of the passing narrative, which also interrogated the soundness of racial identification but resisted generalizing any conclusions into a politics and a worldview ... the result is a book that engages the question of race head-on but often only in the most superficial fashion, one that confuses personal biography with sociology and history. As a result, it lacks the imaginative capacity to see that no matter how socially constructed racial identities are, our lived experience of those identities...is anything but fictitious and cannot simply be willed out of existence. Perhaps even more important, by examining the experience of race from his vantage point alone, Williams fails to see how racial identification, while often deployed as a mechanism to create stratification, can also be an empowering act. For many, identifying as black is not merely an imposition but also an opportunity to interrogate the underpinnings of race.
... a fluent, captivating, if often disquieting story ... There are many openly felt and beautifully rendered moments in Self-Portrait that become frustrating when one considers them closely ... Black writers announcing their freedom from the designs of others is an old and important rite of passage. But freedom that must be announced is freedom that must be invented, something crafted as opposed to organic. Ultimately freedom is, like race, something conceived and then practiced. The question of what it means to be free is no simpler than the question of what it means to be black ... we witness Williams on a journey of both self-discovery and self-creation, and his memoir is most valuable as a way deeper into, as opposed to a way out of, race talk ... ultimately Williams commits the same crime for which he has often indicted Coates—reducing blackness to suffering...If this is all Williams imagines blackness to be, no wonder he wants to reject it ... Self-Portrait is at its most exciting and satisfying when it reveals what a distinctly black story it tells. And ultimately, Williams’s race refusal is only a story, amounting to nothing more than a discursive rebellion. It’s as if he has no skin in the game ... I wish there were something truly at stake to give Williams’s pronouncement more dramatic heft. I wanted to see how far he was willing to take it, what price he would be willing to pay. But Self-Portrait is hardly a how-to book ... In the end, this book about race is no more or less than a story about being a parent, a narrative portrait of a father’s attempt to discover a language that would connect his identity with that of his daughter, who does not look like him. So, finally, Williams’s turning away from race is just a parent’s primal impulse to turn toward his child.
Memoir is Williams’s most powerful device, the lived reality that provides crucial ballast to all his ideas, but it does not magically resolve the contradiction of a figure who uses his identity with one hand and abnegates it with the other ... The Williams of this book is far more measured and ambivalent than the swaggering Williams of social media ... memoir is the most effective tool in Williams’s rhetorical kit, giving his cutting-edge ideas about racelessness the heft of sincerity. But it is simultaneously his weak spot, for if some memoirs aspire to connect the individual to the universal, Williams’s book only succeeds in underscoring just how un-universal his experience has been. His path to postracial enlightenment—which included a book deal in his twenties that allowed him to travel around the world and establish himself as a writer—is so narrow that it is hard to imagine more than one person walking down it, let alone an entire country ... As Williams has exemplified in his own memoir, politics is not just about ideas. It is also about experience—all the ways in which the tectonic movements of the world have subtly entered our lives. Like Williams, like all people of good faith, I want to reach that place where our politics is universal, working toward the benefit of everyone. The question is how to get there. Is it through teaching our children ideas inscribed on a piece of paper? Or is it through inculcating empathy for other people, even those who may seem foreign to us? ... The latter is the principal appeal of identity politics, which is not narrow or divisive, but the opposite: a vehicle for solidarity, community, and true inclusivity. The way to solve the race problem in this country is not to transcend race but to embrace it, to use it as an invitation to everyone to understand humanity’s limitless variety. Whatever politics I possess rests on this truth, familiar to all who still call themselves people of color: that the other is, both literally and figuratively, me.
... almost the very definition of thought-provoking, asking readers to reconsider race from every angle ... Chatterton-Williams meets his every provocation with searching questions and reasoned thought. And he ends with hope.
Williams (Losing My Cool) follows in the footsteps of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates to craft a provocative philosophical argument about the role of race in human identity ... Claiming the uniqueness of the black experience, he argues, is still buying into the racist idea that race is a centrally important facet of identity ... Regardless of whether readers agree with his conclusions, these essays are intellectually rigorous, written in fluid prose, and frequently exhilarating.
A standout memoir that digs into vital contemporary questions of race and self-image ... lyrical, incisive ... We see the author’s psychological struggle as he thinks through the conundrums, including what the confusion might mean for his white-looking children. In the hands of a lesser writer, the back and forth of his pondering could have sunk the memoir. However, it succeeds spectacularly ... An insightful, indispensable memoir.
