The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

March 26, 2020 23

lessons, home study, and open discus-
sion. Philippa was welcome to make
inquiries about her father’s penis when
she was three years old. As an adult,
she sometimes found it convenient to
pass for Spanish when she traveled.
Father Divine, the Harlem cult leader
of the 1930s, described his refusal to
recognize race as “racial indiscrimina-
tion.” He forbade the white and black
members of his Peace Mission from
using the word “Negro.” They were
either “light” or “dark” and they were
seated alternately at Father Divine’s
banquets in celebration of his munifi-
cence. He defied segregation wherever
he could: “My people are the peoples
of the earth.” Personal utopianism
promised psychological independence
from the repetitive propaganda of race.
Psychological studies in the Black
Power 1970s described “nigrescence,”
the process of becoming black, the
movement from an old to a new black
identity. The Racial Identity Attitudes
Scales that psychologists devised to
track the path to self-acceptance were
available to all. In tests with black chil-
dren, even a preference for white dolls
was not a sign of pathology, nigrescence
research assured us. There was no need
to sneak out of the black race anymore,
to be the type of black person whose
distance from other blacks disguised
self-hatred. Black was cool, and every
shade of black person could be black
enough on the inside. But the long ago
can drive back into town and ring your
bell in the middle of the night.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, who be-
longs to the hip-hop generation of mul-
ticulturalism and diversity, is willing to
risk being a throwback in his memoir/
essay Self-Portrait in Black and White:
Unlearning Race. To speculate on the
racial future, he goes back to the days
when the black individual who could
do so took the side exit from segregated
life to personal freedom. He deals with
passing for white, class privilege, and
his hopes for the possibilities of race
transcendence, knowing perfectly well
that because he is light-skinned he can
contemplate racial identity as being
provisional, voluntary, situational, and
fluid. Throughout his memoir, Wil-
liams is thinking more of Camus than
he is of Fanon:

I start from the premise that,

though forces beyond my control

influence and pressure and cer-

tainly constrict me, I am ultimately

responsible for my own beliefs and

actions. Even as a member of a his-

torically oppressed minority, I can

still define myself and in so doing

exercise my agency, irrespective of

how society reacts to me.

Williams’s first memoir, Losing
My Cool (2010), tells the story of his
father’s determination to keep him
from gangsta rap culture when he was
growing up. His father, a black man
who looks black, figures significantly
in Self-Portrait. In 1968, when he was
executive director of the San Diego
County War on Poverty, he met Wil-
liams’s mother, a white girl, recent col-
lege graduate, and devout Protestant.
They married five years later, once he
“was convinced that they were indi-
vidually robust enough to withstand
the ostracism and scrutiny they would
surely encounter—especially once they

decided to have children.” They moved

east, far from relatives. Williams and

his brother “grew up with zero ex-

tended black family contact and very

close to zero extended white family

contact, too.”

He had to learn “blackness.” Even-

tually it “inhabited” him as a middle-

class youth. It was not only a question

of deciding what he looked like, but of

how he spoke, dressed, met the world.

Blackness was rhythm and athleticism,

he says. “Blackness was what you loved

and what in turn loved or at least ac-

cepted you.” In Self-Portrait, Williams

reconsiders his experiences in high

school, then how his college years at

Georgetown University changed him.

He examines his family relationships,

including his meeting late in life with

his religious maternal grandfather who

had refused to visit when he was grow-

ing up. During his first sojourn in Paris

(where he now lives), the Arabs he met

spoke to him in Arabic, because he

looked like someone from their part of

the world. In his Brooklyn life, he was

deep into discussions about race on

social media, suspecting that Michael

Brown maybe wasn’t entirely innocent

in Ferguson, but not doubting what

happened to Eric Garner in that choke-

hold on Staten Island.

Williams has looked at writings

from Linnaeus to the Journal of Criti-

cal Mixed-Race Studies. He was espe-

cially drawn to Racecraft: The Soul of

Inequality in American Life (2012) by

Barbara and Karen Fields, who argue,

as he puts it, that racism created race,

and even with our willingness to speak

out against racism we take the “con-

cept of race as an implacable given,”

perpetuating the problem. Everyone—

blacks, whites of goodwill, Asians,

Latinos—should “remove themselves

from the confidence game,” he advises.

The “disinvestment from the politics

of racial identity” would let “entire

classes” of Americans focus on their

shared vulnerabilities.

“I am not renouncing my blackness

and going on about my day,” Williams

says. “I am rejecting the legitimacy

of the entire racial construct in which

blackness functions as one orienting

pole.” Though Williams is impressed

by Adrian Piper, the philosopher and

conceptual artist who in 2012 publicly

“retired” from being black, her recent

Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir

(2018) shows that her retirement hasn’t

lasted. Even when you’re done with

ALL THE HORRORS OF WAR

A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation

of Bergen-Belsen

Bernice Lerner

“This meticulously researched story is nourishment

for the soul.”—Robert G. Kegan, author of In Over Our

Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life

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THE DOCTOR WHO FOOLED

THE WORLD

Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines

Brian Deer

The story of Andrew Wakefi eld—the man behind the

false link between the MMR vaccine and autism—and

the conspiracy fueling a global epidemic, from the

prize–winning journalist who broke the story.

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NOT EVEN PAST

The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War

Cody Marrs

“In the American imagination the Civil War has never

really ended. This is a splendid book, and one that asks

existential and fundamental questions about this thing

we call the United States.”—David W. Blight, author of

the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet

of Freedom $28.00 hc/eb

THE OPIOID FIX

America’s Addiction Crisis and the Solution

They Don’t Want You to Have

Barbara Andraka-Christou

Why medication-assisted treatment, the most eff ective

tool for battling opioid addiction, is signifi cantly

underused in the United States. $27.00 hc/eb

MALIGNANT

How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People

with Cancer

Vinayak K. Prasad, MD, MPH

How hype, money, and bias can mislead the public into

thinking that many worthless or unproven treatments

are eff ective. $32.95 hc/eb

press.jhu.edu 

TRUT H S be TOLD