24 The New York Review
being black and blackness, it seems
that you cannot cease explaining why.
Racial difference may be an eco-
nomic, political, biological, or cultural
problem, but it’s also a philosophical
and imaginative disaster, Williams
thinks. While “racism rooted in centu-
ries of skin bias is persistent and feels
more urgent than just about anything
else when you bear the brunt of it,” he
doesn’t see why we can’t resist bigotry
and at the same time imagine a soci-
ety that has “outgrown the identities
it preys on.” The world is used to race
mixing, and people aren’t the sum of
their ethnic characteristics anyway. We
talk about race when we mean class—
manners, values, taste. “We don’t have
to limit our points of reference and in-
spiration to identity groups that perpet-
uate the idea of racial difference. We
can also choose to expand our vision
of ourselves, and bring about a fuller
rendering of our common, complex
human condition.” Racial injury has
harmed us all; let’s grieve, but let’s fix it
by rejecting the logic that perpetuates
the injury: “It is my hope that as many
people as possible, of all skin tones and
hair textures, will come to turn away
from the racial delusion.”
Having looked at the color line from
both sides, Williams says he has a “dual
perspective,” like that of Walter White,
James Weldon Johnson’s NAACP col-
league, who in the 1920s used his blond
hair and blue eyes to sit in on Klan meet-
ings. (Thirty years later White lost re-
spect among many blacks by publishing a
satire in which a miracle chemical solves
the race problem by turning everyone
white.) Williams wagers that in an age
of dangerous populism his dual perspec-
tive is a better way of seeing race than
always going on about white supremacy.
Williams remembers not taking his
wife to a dinner for Ishmael Reed at the
Paris home of the saxophonist David
Murray, only to be surprised that his he-
roes also had white wives. Reed would
have remembered the East Village of
the early 1960s, when most of the black
men in radical black organizations had
white lovers. Half a century later Wil-
liams is asking “why it is so often the
case that men like us, men who tend to
be paid to think about and engage criti-
cally with the subject of race.. .why is
it that we have all made our lives with
white partners?” He wonders if “mar-
rying out” could be an “indispensable”
part of the solution “to the quagmire of
racism without race,” not a tribal be-
trayal. When Williams’s father met his
fiancée, a blond French girl,
I think that what he saw between
Valentine and me was a kind of
freedom—a sovereign liberty to
improvise and create the self with-
out external constraints, which in
truth he had always prized above
just about everything. In this way,
the black tradition my father be-
longed to was the open, omni-
faceted one of Albert Murray and
not at all that closed and spiteful
one of Eldridge Cleaver: black
American life, while certainly con-
ditioned by local historical circum-
stance—and thus distinct from
other strands of the African dias-
pora—was not beholden to it. It
was a racial irony or ambivalence
that would take me several more
years to understand clearly.What comes through in Self-Portrait
is a son’s pride before his father that in
him the family continues its rise, gets
even farther away from those shameful
Texas cotton fields. He lives in France,
more comfortable with his wife’s ma-
ternal grandmother and her long fam-
ily history of answerable questions
than he is with the unspoken feelings
on his mother’s side and the history
that can’t be known on his father’s.
This conjunction of histories in his
own life has shown him that race can
be transcended “especially at the inter-
personal level.” Blackness, like white-
ness, isn’t real, Williams declares in his
concluding chapter, “Self-Portrait of an
Ex-Black Man,” and he refuses to feel
guilty anymore for saying so, contra-
dicting his earlier assertion that he was
not renouncing blackness and going
about his business: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 re-
inforce the same racist habits of
thought they claim to wish to de-
feat. I do not mean this last point
rhetorically—I mean it literally.
Black Lives Matter, for example,
is a cause whose aims—primarily
the work of drawing attention to
the severe abuses of the criminal
justice system—I overwhelmingly
share. Yet its very framing—the
notion that some lives are es-
sentially black while others are
white—is both politically true in
a specific sense and, in a broader
way, philosophically inadequate.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 “relieved” that there
will be no vulnerability of the body for
his children, first a daughter and then
a son. They are white or white-looking
and not likely to experience racial dis-
crimination or racial violence. They
will not be “irrevocably stigmatized by
the inhumanity of chattel slavery.” He
is full of the magnanimity of protective
fatherhood and does not want any of us
to be defined by the sordid past.Temperament, era, geography, and
gender matter when looking at the lit-
erature about seeking release from de-
structive racial subjectivities. The poet
Toi Derricotte, who suffers from de-
pression and is haunted by memories of
an abusive father, recalls in her mem-
oir, The Black Notebooks: An Interior
Journey (1997), that an elderly relative
told her the family had worked too hard
to look the way they did for her to mess
them up by marrying the wrong man.
Derricotte comes from generations of
Louisiana “bright folk”—black people
who look white. Her banker husband
looks black, and realtors show her dif-
ferent properties when she is by herself.
Neighbors in the upper-middle-class
New Jersey suburb where they lived for
more than a decade never asked them
to join the country club.
When Derricotte was first starting
out as a college teacher, she wasn’t try-ing to pass, she just didn’t say in cer-
tain professional situations that she
was black. She has plenty of examples
of white people making racist remarks
when they think the company is all
white: “I cannot conceive of white
people having a communal pain that
equals the compelling energy and focus
that comes from being black in our so-
ciety.” However, if she has been around
white people for a while, then she is
momentarily thrown when she again
finds herself with a black person.
Her memoir describes the culture of
what Alice Walker first called “color-
ism,” the prejudices among blacks based
on skin tone. “If you’re light, all right; if
you’re brown, stick around; but if you’re
black, get back.” Studies such as Mar-
garet L. Hunter’s Race, Gender, and the
Politics of Skin Tone (2005) compare
how light-skinned black students and
dark-skinned black students are treated
in the classroom. Darker students are
more likely to be treated with suspicion
and not seen as academically promising.
Williams thinks of “colorism” as a
power imbalance. Yet he hesitates to
dream of a new caste in the West, be-
cause of the class implications: “With
the one-drop custom I was born into now
at long last on the wane, could the rise of
a comparatively privileged, white-beige
population (including ever more Asians,
Latinos, and further decreasingly
‘black’ mixtures), unburdened by such
concerns and—as technical minorities
themselves—impervious to accusations
of ‘white privilege,’ result in a stigma-
tized, dark-skinned population’s further
neglect?” He recommends detachment
to everyone even as he says that it’s hard
for him to talk to young black audiences
in the US about his coming-of-age mem-
oir, because he realizes that his experi-
ence of what it means to be black has
now with his career veered so far away
from theirs.After the 1960s revolution in mass
black consciousness, celebrating the
earthiness of blackness was often writ-
ten about as a measure of a black per-
son’s self-acceptance. The light-skinned,
Radcliffe-educated narrator of Andrea
Lee’s Sarah Phillips (1984), in Paris
in 1974, decides to go back to the US
after her rough trade French boyfriend
teases her in bed—as she has urged him
to do—about being descended from a
half- Irish, half- Jewish mongrel who was
raped by “a jazz musician as big and
black as King Kong.” She says the racism
of his remarks didn’t wound her as much
as it reminded her how futile it was to
try to escape America. Lee’s novel sug-
gests that the black person deciding to
go home is another literary convention,
a trope picked up from James Baldwin,
serving the same moral function as the
heroine renouncing the white man in
the passing novels as written by black
women in the late nineteenth century.
Richard Wright and his Jewish-
American wife moved to France in
1947, in part for the sake of their chil-
dren. He never went back to the US,
dying in Paris in 1960, still an exile
emotionally. Baldwin also remained
an expatriate, like Chester Himes,
who simmered away in Franco’s Spain
at a time when most artists boycotted
the country. Baldwin’s contemporary
William Gardner Smith married into
France, so to speak, and found employ-
ment with Agence-France Presse. Two
of his five novels, Last of the Conquer-ors (1948) and The Stone Face (1963),
deal with nonwhite people confront-
ing racism in postwar Europe. Wil-
liam Demby, another black novelist of
Baldwin’s generation, worked for Fed-
erico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini in
Rome. His novel The Catacombs (1965)
tells the story of a black American girl
abandoned by her aristocratic Italian
lover when she becomes pregnant. In
his long life in Italy, Demby married
the writer Lucia Drudi and had a son.
Apart from Himes, these black writ-
ers had white wives or white long-term
girlfriends, but they were not them-
selves light-skinned. They were getting
away from US racism, not getting away
from being black. Europe was a refuge,
but to be an expatriate was still some-
thing like passing, a personal response
to American racism that brought with
it the anxiety that privilege and luck
were forms of betrayal.
Vincent O. Carter felt suffocated by
the life blacks could lead in Paris on
the GI Bill. He moved to Bern, Swit-
zerland, in the early 1950s to get away
from other blacks, and therefore from
himself. He was the only black in the
city at the time. In his memoir, The
Bern Book (1973), he is frank about
the resentment he felt when a delega-
tion of Ethiopian diplomats passed
through town, as though their presence
made him less special. He died in Bern
in 1983. That same year, novelist Frank
Yerby, Himes’s contemporary, gave
a news agency an interview in which
he said, “You can call me racist if you
like, but I dislike the human race.”
Yerby published more than two dozen
popular romances and historical novels
that sometimes had black characters.
“But do not call me black,” he said. He
claimed to have more Seminole than
black blood. Yerby had a Spanish wife
and family and died in 1991 in Madrid,
where he had been living since 1955.
Andrea Lee’s Russian Journal
(1981) chronicles her year in Moscow
when her Italian husband was a gradu-
ate student at Moscow State University.
They spoke Russian, made friends, and
shared Soviet life, up to a point. Lee is
the observer, keeping a tender focus on
her Russian subjects, never mention-
ing that she is black. Light-skinned,
she was not what Russians expected
when they thought of black people.
Whatever the official ideology or the
political culture that used to equate the
Russian soul and black soul, Soviet so-
ciety was racist. Lee’s situational pass-
ing, the absence of scenes in which her
being black is acknowledged or judged,
lets her borrow American power. She
was at an advantage in her exchanges,
because the Russians she encountered
saw her as the white American, some-
one from a land of plenty and not from
a group that commanded little respect.
Lee and her husband settled in
northern Italy and had a family, and
she began exploring, “both in life and
in art, what it means to be a foreigner.”
Racial identity comes up in her fic-
tion and autobiographical essays, as
it does in the political fiction of Jake
Lamar, who lives in Paris. Europe isn’t
all white anymore—it never was—and
black American writers share a cul-
tural landscape with black writers in
English from other places, such as the
Afro-British novelist Sharon Dodua
Otoo, whose first work, the things I am
thinking while smiling politely (2012),
follows a black woman in Berlin as she
recovers from divorce from her Ger-