{"id":58964,"date":"2019-09-26T01:31:54","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T01:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58964"},"modified":"2019-09-26T01:31:54","modified_gmt":"2019-09-26T01:31:54","slug":"book-reviews-self-portrait-in-black-and-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58964","title":{"rendered":"Book Reviews: Self-Portrait in Black and White"},"content":{"rendered":"

Book Reviews: Self-Portrait in Black and White<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Tablet<\/a>
\n2019-09-24<\/p>\n

Daniel Oppenheimer<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Curtain<\/a><\/p>\n

The rewards of subordinating racial or ethnic identity, in the new memoiristic essay by the author of \u2018Losing My Cool<\/a>\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Thomas Chatterton Williams\u2019<\/a> new book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race<\/em><\/a>, is a few things. It\u2019a memoiristic follow-up to his first book, Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man\u2019s Escape from the Crowd<\/em><\/a>; a meditation on what it means for a black man to discover that he\u2019s fathered white children; and an impassioned argument for rejecting the whole modern paradigm of black and white.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also, I think, an effort to answer for himself one of the essential questions that many older liberals, who were formed before the rise of identity politics<\/a>, simply can\u2019t answer or even adequately ask. What does one get in return for subordinating one\u2019s racial or ethnic identity? Folks like Mark Lilla<\/a>, Francis Fukuyama<\/a>, Sam Harris<\/a>, Laura Kipnis<\/a>, Andrew Sullivan<\/a>, Jonathan Chait<\/a>, and Jonathan Haidt<\/a> are on the front lines of the present culture war making compelling arguments that our society needs shared values and narratives to sustain itself, that collectively it is in our best interests to privilege our commonalities over our differences. They\u2019re not, however, providing interesting or persuasive psychological answers to why any given individual would be moved to let his or her racial or ethnic identity attenuate when it is actively providing strength and solace. Or why young people, not yet fully formed, would abstain from the identities that are not just au courant but manifestly powerful in their capacity to compel deference or compliance from the establishment. They\u2019re not offering a new synthesis that incorporates some of the insights and aesthetics of identity politics. They\u2019re mostly arguing for a return to the previous liberal synthesis…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The rewards of subordinating racial or ethnic identity, in the new memoiristic essay by the author of \u2018Losing My Cool\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,28,8,6941,20],"tags":[96,19592,19593,4725],"class_list":["post-58964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-europe","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","category-usa","tag-france","tag-tablet","tag-tablet-magazine","tag-thomas-chatterton-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58964","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=58964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58965,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58964\/revisions\/58965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}