November 25, 2019 The Nation. 31CHARTS FOR TESTING COLOR BLINDNESS (WELLCOME COLLECTION)
E
arly in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella
Passing, Clare Kendry speaks nervous-
ly of her daughter Margery’s birth. “I
nearly died of terror the whole nine
months before Margery was born,”
she confesses. She is, for all intents and pur-
poses, a white woman married to a wealthy
white man. Yet she finds herself fearing that
her child’s birth will reveal her for what she
is: a black woman who passes for white. If a
child of Clare’s came out dark, it would be
evidence of her passing. Luckily, Margery
was born fair skinned. “Thank goodness,
she turned out all right.”
A similar scene unfolds at the begin-
ning of Thomas Chatterton Williams’s new
memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White:
Unlearning Race. In 2013, Williams—theson of a white woman and a black man—and
his white French wife are living in Paris
when she gives birth to their daughter, Mar-
low. Like Margery, Marlow arrives with fair
skin. But this is not a comfort to Williams;
instead, it comes as a shock. “It took my
sluggish mind a moment to register and sort
the sounds; and then it hit me that [the doc-
tor] was looking at my daughter’s head and
reporting back that it was blond,” he recalls.
Unlike Clare’s child, Williams’s blond
baby is not the cause of relief but of psychic
agitation. For Williams, she’s a portal into a
new conception of his own racial identity. “I
was aware...however vaguely, that whatever
personal identity I had previously inhabited,
I had now crossed into something new and
different,” he writes. While Williams had
long considered himself black, Marlow’s
arrival unsettled his assumptions about how
real race is to begin with. “The sight of this
blond-haired, blue-eyed, impossibly fair-skinned child shocked me—along with the
knowledge that she was indubitably mine,”
he writes. How can the world consider this
child black, and what does it say about his
racial identity that he has fathered her?
Even more important, his daughter’s birth
raises a set of deeper existential and political
questions. What does it say about race that
some of the key assumptions that buttress
Western conceptions of racial identity—
that one’s skin color can tell us one’s race,
for instance—dissolve in the face of reality’s
manifold intricacies?
Marlow’s arrival leads Williams to-
ward introspection and from there to a
full-throated denunciation of racial identity
as a mere abstraction. He announces, fer-
vently and often, that race is nothing but
an oppressive fiction that enables precisely
those evils that anti-racist critics condemn.
“I want to say that I will no longer enter into
the all-American skin game that demands
you select a box and define yourself by it.” It
is, he adds, “a mistake for any of us to reify
something that is as demonstrably harmful
as it is fictitious.” Williams is just one man,
but he, at least, has elected to “walk away”
from what he views as a confidence game.
Self-Portrait wants to be two things at
once: a call to arms against the constrict-
ing power of race as an identity, which
Williams calls a “philosophical and imag-
inative disaster,” as well as a follow-up to
his 2010 memoir, Losing My Cool. As such,
the new book discusses his incredibly spe-
cific cultural background and intellectual
development and attempts to sort through
the questions that his biography raises,
questions that cannot be easily general-
ized to fit other people’s experiences. This
necessarily means that Williams extrap-
olates from his personal story to make
categorical proclamations about the nature
of racial identity. Yet 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 world-
view. With Williams, 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 bi-
ography with sociology and history. As
a result, it lacks the imaginative capacity
to see that no matter how socially con-
structed racial identities are, our lived ex-
perience of those identities—the cultures,COLOR BLIND
Thomas Chatterton Williams’s argument against race
by ISMAIL MUHAMMAD
Ismail Muhammad is the reviews editor at The
Believer. His work has appeared in The New
York Times, Bookforum, and other venues.