{"id":59032,"date":"2019-10-15T19:18:04","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T19:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59032"},"modified":"2019-10-15T19:18:04","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T19:18:04","slug":"is-it-time-to-unlearn-race-thomas-chatterton-williams-says-yes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59032","title":{"rendered":"Is it time to unlearn race? Thomas Chatterton Williams says yes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is it time to unlearn race? Thomas Chatterton Williams says yes<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
\n2019-10-15<\/p>\n

Summer Sewell<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Editor of Features<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nThomas Chatterton Williams<\/a>: \u2018I think you have to be an optimist.\u2019 Photograph: Alex John Beck<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The author and critic discusses why we should move away from race categories defined \u2018using plantation logic\u2019 \u2013 and suggests \u2018retiring from race\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

The American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/a> is racially ambiguous enough to be mistaken as Algerian in Paris<\/a>, where he and his French wife are raising two children, their heads capped with airy blond curls.<\/p>\n

It was the birth of his older child, Marlow, six years ago, that set off an instant panic in him. She can pass for Swedish, he says. So what did it mean that he, then a self-identified black man who had always accepted the black\/white binary, had a child who would be perceived as white?<\/p>\n

It meant, at first, he would apply camera filters to darken her skin \u2013 to make her belong, to him and to a race. Eventually, it meant asking questions complex enough to alter how he identifies himself now: what does it mean to belong to a race, part of which for black people can include \u201can allegiance to pain\u201d? And why would passing that down to his daughter make her black?<\/p>\n

In his second book, out Tuesday, Self-Portrait in Black and White<\/em><\/a>, he calls for us to consider why we uphold race categories defined \u201cusing plantation logic\u201d and encourages us to do away with the arbitrary nomenclature altogether. Not to be confused with the term \u201cpost-race\u201d, he suggests \u201cretiring from race\u201d, \u201ctranscending race\u201d, \u201cunlearning race\u201d. It\u2019s a big ask, he admits.<\/p>\n

Because both of us are mixed-race people who grew up with one black parent and one white parent, Chatterton Williams thinks he and I have a head start on dismissing the barriers of race. We both remember the first time we were \u201craced\u201d by a stranger and simultaneously separated from our white parent, and setting out from then on to continually contemplate race in our respective lives. For him, this has come to mean examining the artificiality of it.<\/p>\n

On the campus of Bard College<\/a>, a private arts college upstate New York<\/a> where he taught a four-week course, Can we retire from race?, this fall, we discussed the privilege of proximity to whiteness, whether it is asking too much of black people to let go of race while retaining the pride of an identity forged in the face of systematic oppression and, finally, why he\u2019s optimistic norms can change…<\/p>\n

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

The author and critic discusses why we should move away from race categories defined \u2018using plantation logic\u2019 \u2013 and suggests \u2018retiring from race\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,125,13743,8,6462],"tags":[30361,2103,4725],"class_list":["post-59032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-identitydevelopment","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","tag-summer-sewell","tag-the-guardian","tag-thomas-chatterton-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59032","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=59032"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59034,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59032\/revisions\/59034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}