{"id":59048,"date":"2019-10-16T01:25:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T01:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59048"},"modified":"2019-10-16T01:28:08","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T01:28:08","slug":"how-to-become-an-ex-black-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59048","title":{"rendered":"How to become an ex-black man"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to become an ex-black man<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2019-10-11<\/p>\n

Carlos Lozada<\/strong><\/a>, Book Critic<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Protesters<\/a>
\nProtesters march in the street in Ferguson, Mo.<\/a>, on Aug. 20, 2014. (Jeff Roberson, File)<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race<\/strong><\/em><\/a>
\nBy Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/a>. Norton. 174 pp. $25.95<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/a> has seen the future, and he is it.<\/p>\n

The son of a mother who is \u201cunambiguously white\u201d and a father whom none has described as \u201canything other than black,\u201d Williams grew up in middle-class New Jersey<\/a> suburbia, where he sought to assert his black identity through hip-hop<\/a>, basketball and BET<\/a>. Blackness, and America\u2019s racial binary, became \u201cso fundamental to my self-conception that I\u2019d never rigorously reflected on its foundations,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

But now Williams has reflected, and he finds blackness lacking. Not just blackness but whiteness, too, and any divisions and hierarchies based on race or color, those resilient constructs to which Americans attach such weight. Williams, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine<\/em>, has come to see himself as an \u201cex-black man,\u201d a transformation he contemplates in a thoughtful yet frustrating memoir, \u201cSelf-Portrait in Black and White<\/a>.\u201d The precipitating force was the birth of his daughter, Marlow, who entered the world with blond hair, light skin and \u201ca pair of inky-blue irises that I knew even then would lighten considerably but never turn brown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Upon seeing her, Williams realizes that \u201cwhatever personal identity I had previously inhabited, I had now crossed into something new and different.\u201d It is for Marlow, and because of her, that Williams comes to embrace the \u201cfluidity of racial borders.\u201d To that end, he painstakingly reconsiders just about every potentially relevant aspect of his life \u2014 his relationships, his distant relatives, his DNA test<\/a> (39.9 percent sub-Saharan, 58.7 percent European), his elementary school days, the shape of his face, even a single strand of light hair emanating from his clavicle \u2014 as part of his attempt at \u201coutgrowing the bounds and divisions of identity, of touching the universal.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

Thomas Chatterton Williams has seen the future, and he is it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,5,8,6941,20],"tags":[14992,2875,4725,2581],"class_list":["post-59048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","category-usa","tag-carlos-lozada","tag-the-washington-post","tag-thomas-chatterton-williams","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59048","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=59048"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59051,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59048\/revisions\/59051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}