{"id":59215,"date":"2019-11-12T19:02:55","date_gmt":"2019-11-12T19:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59215"},"modified":"2019-11-12T19:02:55","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T19:02:55","slug":"color-blind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59215","title":{"rendered":"Color Blind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Color Blind<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Nation<\/a>
\n2019-11-11<\/p>\n

Ismail Muhammad<\/strong><\/a>, Reviews Editor
\nThe Believer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nCharts for testing color blindness<\/a>. (Wellcome Collection)<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Thomas Chatterton Williams\u2019s<\/a> argument against race.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race<\/em><\/a> (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Early in Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> 1929 novella Passing<\/em><\/a>, Clare Kendry speaks nervously of her daughter Margery\u2019s birth. \u201cI nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born,\u201d she confesses. She is, for all intents and purposes, a white woman married to a wealthy white man. Yet she finds herself fearing that her child\u2019s birth will reveal her for what she is: a black woman who passes for white<\/a>. If a child of Clare\u2019s came out dark, it would be evidence of her passing. Luckily, Margery was born fair skinned. \u201cThank goodness, she turned out all right.\u201d<\/p>\n

A similar scene unfolds at the beginning of Thomas Chatterton Williams\u2019s<\/a> new memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race<\/em><\/a>. In 2013, Williams\u2014the son of a white woman and a black man\u2014and his white French wife are living in Paris when she gives birth to their daughter, Marlow. Like Margery, Marlow arrives with fair skin. But this is not a comfort to Williams; instead, it comes as a shock. \u201cIt took my sluggish mind a moment to register and sort the sounds; and then it hit me that [the doctor] was looking at my daughter\u2019s head and reporting back that it was blond,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

Unlike Clare\u2019s child, Williams\u2019s blond baby is not the cause of relief but of psychic agitation. For Williams, she\u2019s a portal into a new conception of his own racial identity. \u201cI was aware\u2026however vaguely, that whatever personal identity I had previously inhabited, I had now crossed into something new and different,\u201d he writes. While Williams had long considered himself black, Marlow\u2019s arrival unsettled his assumptions about how real race is to begin with. \u201cThe sight of this blond-haired, blue-eyed, impossibly fair-skinned child shocked me\u2014along with the knowledge that she was indubitably mine,\u201d he writes. How can the world consider this child black, and what does it say about his racial identity that he has fathered her? Even more important, his daughter\u2019s birth raises a set of deeper existential and political questions. What does it say about race that some of the key assumptions that buttress Western conceptions of racial identity\u2014that one\u2019s skin color can tell us one\u2019s race, for instance\u2014dissolve in the face of reality\u2019s manifold intricacies?…<\/p>\n

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

Thomas Chatterton Williams\u2019s argument against race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,5,8,6462,6941],"tags":[28042,2831,4725],"class_list":["post-59215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-philosophy","tag-ismail-muhammad","tag-the-nation","tag-thomas-chatterton-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59215","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=59215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59216,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59215\/revisions\/59216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}