{"id":58308,"date":"2019-06-06T19:59:34","date_gmt":"2019-06-06T19:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58308"},"modified":"2019-06-07T20:34:08","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T20:34:08","slug":"the-notion-that-to-see-myself-is-to-see-a-mixed-race-heterosexual-endomorphic-contemporary-i-think-really-reduces-what-the-self-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58308","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe notion that to see myself is to see a mixed race, heterosexual, endomorphic contemporary, I think really reduces what the self is.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Otis Houston<\/a>: You agree that it\u2019s important for people to see a black family in the White House<\/a>, if only to demonstrate that it\u2019s possible. Is it also important for black children to be able to see people who look like them on television, or in movies, or even in television commercials? Is there an importance in people, whatever their background, seeing folks who superficially resemble them included in mainstream media<\/a>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/strong><\/a>: Yeah, there probably is. I\u2019m sure that there is. But one thing that often gets lost in a lot of these debates is that black people have only ever been around 12 percent of the population. So it doesn\u2019t really bother me or my sense of myself if I don\u2019t always see myself. Also \u2014 getting back to my own obtuseness or na\u00efvet\u00e9 \u2014 I saw myself in Crime and Punishment<\/em><\/a> in a way that I did with very few novels in which the protagonist resembled me and my American contemporary social identity. I saw myself in The Brothers Karamazov<\/em><\/a>. I saw myself in the novels of Roberto Bola\u00f1o<\/a>, and in Borges\u2019s<\/a> Ficciones<\/em><\/a> set in Buenos Aires<\/a>. The self is really something that I don\u2019t think can be boiled down to physical appearance, necessarily, or to gender, to epoch, to time or era, to language. The notion that to see myself is to see a mixed race, heterosexual, endomorphic<\/a> contemporary, I think really reduces what the self is.<\/p>\n

I never saw myself more clearly than in the novels of Dostoyevsky<\/a> when I was in college. No one has ever spoken more to my sense of myself. And I can see myself in Batman<\/a>. I relate to Bruce Wayne<\/a> more than I do to the Black Panther<\/a>, if we have to go into comic books. I don\u2019t want to be glib about it \u2014 I understand why a young boy or young girl needing some self-esteem, a young girl seeing Wonder Woman<\/em><\/a> \u2026 I get it. But I think we really should not go too far with it, or we risk restricting the self too severely. The self is a multitudinous thing, right?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Otis Houston, \u201cThe Singular Power of Writing: A Conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/a>,\u201d Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>, April 12, 2019. https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/the-singular-power-of-writing-a-conversation-with-thomas-chatterton-williams<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Otis Houston: You agree that it\u2019s important for people to see a black family in the White House, if only to demonstrate that it\u2019s possible. Is it also important for black children to be able to see people who look like them on television, or in movies, or even in television commercials? Is there an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14582,29904,4725],"class_list":["post-58308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-los-angeles-review-of-books","tag-otis-houston","tag-thomas-chatterton-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58308"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58314,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58308\/revisions\/58314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}