{"id":59052,"date":"2019-10-16T01:51:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T01:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59052"},"modified":"2019-10-16T02:10:26","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T02:10:26","slug":"can-americans-unlearn-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59052","title":{"rendered":"Can Americans Unlearn Race?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can Americans Unlearn Race?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

American Interest<\/a>
\n2019-10-15<\/p>\n

Morten H\u00f8i Jensen<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\u201cWillie and Holcha\u201d by William H. Johnson<\/a> (Wikimedia Commons)<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In his lucid new memoir<\/a>, Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/a> channels Albert Camus<\/a> and James Baldwin<\/a>\u2014and offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the tired racial dogmas of both Right and Left.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reflecting on why he decided to leave America<\/a> for Europe<\/a>, James Baldwin<\/a> once explained that he wanted to \u201cfind out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.\u201d The racism of American society in the late 1940s prohibited him from doing so at home, where he was always \u201cmerely a Negro.\u201d Only by going abroad could he find the freedom to really ask himself what it meant to be black, to be American, to be African-American. By encountering people so different from himself, Baldwin wrote, he felt at last \u201ca shattering in me of preconceptions I scarcely knew I held.\u201d The constraints of American notions of race and identity were loosened by the existence of entirely different notions. \u201cThe time has come,\u201d Baldwin decided, \u201cfor us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/a> has followed in the footsteps of Baldwin\u2019s Parisian emigration. Raised in suburban New Jersey<\/a> by a white mother and black father, Williams grew up thinking of himself not as half-white or of mixed race but as \u201cblack, period.\u201d In his literary debut, Losing My Cool<\/em><\/a> (2010), he recounted an adolescence suffused with hip-hop culture<\/a> and received ideas about a particular kind of black identity. In high school, in the mid-to-late 1990s, Williams strode the hallways with a sweatshop\u2019s worth of flashy apparel, paid homage to the gods of BET<\/a>, and lived by the dubious moral code of the Big Tymers<\/a> and Master P.<\/a> At the local basketball court, he was awestruck by a player known as RaShawn, who sipped Olde English<\/a> before games, kept in his pocket a knot of bills \u201cas thick and layered as a Spanish onion,\u201d and often resorted to viciously beating up his opponents. \u201cHe was like a star to me,\u201d Williams admitted…<\/p>\n

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

In his lucid new memoir, Thomas Chatterton Williams channels Albert Camus and James Baldwin\u2014and offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the tired racial dogmas of both Right and Left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,5,28,1196,8,6941,20],"tags":[30368,30365,1239,30367,30366,4725],"class_list":["post-59052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-book-reviews","category-europe","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","category-usa","tag-albert-camus","tag-american-interest","tag-james-baldwin","tag-morten-hoi-jensen","tag-the-american-interest","tag-thomas-chatterton-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59052","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=59052"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59057,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59052\/revisions\/59057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}