{"id":59337,"date":"2019-12-24T02:48:28","date_gmt":"2019-12-24T02:48:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59337"},"modified":"2020-02-07T18:26:24","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T18:26:24","slug":"autobiography-of-an-ex-black-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59337","title":{"rendered":"Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Harpers’s<\/a>
\nDecember 2019<\/p>\n

Emily Bernard<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/a> loses his race<\/em><\/p>\n

Self-Portrait in Black and White<\/em><\/a>, by Thomas Chatterton Williams. W. W. Norton. 192 pages. $25.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What a strange thing is \u201crace,\u201d and family, stranger still.<\/em>
\n\u2014Elizabeth Alexander, \u201cRace\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m the happiest I\u2019ve ever been!\u201d declares Wanda Sykes<\/a> in her 2016 Epix<\/a> special, What Happened . . . Ms. Sykes?<\/em><\/a> As one of her fans, I was glad to hear it. As a member of a racially and culturally mixed family, I was particularly charmed to learn the circumstances of Sykes\u2019s joy. For ten years, Wanda Sykes has been a mother. Her wife, Alex Niedbalski<\/a>, gave birth to twins Olivia and Lucas in 2009. \u201cMy kids are white<\/em> white, you know? I mean blond hair, blue eyes. I\u2019m talking Frozen<\/em><\/a>,\u201d says Sykes.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever in a million years would I have imagined myself in this situation.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s the thing. I\u2019m a black woman from Virginia<\/a>,\u201d she continues. \u201cI went to an H.B.C.U.<\/a>, historically black college\u2014I went to Hampton University. I pledged the first black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority<\/a>, Incorporated. So I got a lot of black going on.\u201d The audience roars. \u201cAnd now I\u2019m married to a white French woman, and I have two white kids. Fucked up my legacy.\u201d She throws her arm up to the ceiling.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, don\u2019t get me wrong,\u201d she says. \u201cI love my family. I love my family dearly, you know, and I wish we could live in a color-blind society. Yeah. But I gotta admit, I see<\/em> shit.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Self-Portrait<\/em><\/a> is Williams\u2019s attempt to liberate his mind from the shackles of conventional racial designations once he realizes that his children will never be seen by anyone\u2014not even, most likely, by themselves\u2014as black. Williams, the son of a white mother and a black father, whom he calls \u201cPappy\u201d and who serves as an intellectual and ethical anchor in Self-Portrait<\/em> and a previous memoir, marries a white French woman, and their firstborn child, a daughter named Marlow, emerges in the delivery room with blond hair and blue eyes. Because Marlow will not share his racial identity, Williams decides that that identity no longer suits him. Instead of black, by the end of the book, he calls himself \u201cex-black\u201d\u2014which may be a bit like threatening to run away from home but never making it past the front porch.<\/p>\n

Still, Self-Portrait<\/em> is a fluent, captivating, if often disquieting story. Thomas Chatterton Williams and Wanda Sykes have many of the same questions about the way race will affect how they relate to their children, and how their children will see themselves. \u201cIn all of these white rooms that she is being brought up in, what will she learn to think of herself?\u201d Williams writes about Marlow. But there is not much to laugh about in Self-Portrait<\/em>, which begins with a lot of hand-wringing over Marlow\u2019s fate. \u201cWill she develop my ancestral GPS,\u201d Williams writes, \u201cor will that signal fade\u2014would it even be right for me to transmit my habits of orientation, some of which are riddled with guilt and steeped in illusion, to her untroubled head?\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

Thomas Chatterton Williams loses his race<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,5,125,8,6941],"tags":[6465,30577,30578,4725],"class_list":["post-59337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-book-reviews","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","tag-emily-bernard","tag-harperss","tag-harperss-magazine","tag-thomas-chatterton-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59337","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=59337"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59496,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59337\/revisions\/59496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}