Color BlindPosted in Articles, Autobiography, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, Passing, Philosophy on 2019-11-12 19:02Z by Steven |
The Nation
2019-11-11
Ismail Muhammad, Reviews Editor
The Believer
![]() Charts for testing color blindness. (Wellcome Collection) |
Thomas Chatterton Williamsâs argument against race.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019)
Early in Nella Larsenâs 1929 novella Passing, Clare Kendry speaks nervously of her daughter Margeryâs birth. âI nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born,â 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 childâs birth will reveal her for what she is: a black woman who passes for white. If a child of Clareâs came out dark, it would be evidence of her passing. Luckily, Margery was born fair skinned. âThank goodness, she turned out all right.â
A similar scene unfolds at the beginning of Thomas Chatterton Williamsâs new memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race. In 2013, Williamsâthe son of a white woman and a black manâand 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. âIt took my sluggish mind a moment to register and sort the sounds; and then it hit me that [the doctor] was looking at my daughterâs head and reporting back that it was blond,â he recalls.
Unlike Clareâs child, Williamsâs blond baby is not the cause of relief but of psychic agitation. For Williams, sheâs a portal into a new conception of his own racial identity. âI was awareâŠhowever vaguely, that whatever personal identity I had previously inhabited, I had now crossed into something new and different,â he writes. While Williams had long considered himself black, Marlowâs arrival unsettled his assumptions about how real race is to begin with. âThe sight of this blond-haired, blue-eyed, impossibly fair-skinned child shocked meâalong with the knowledge that she was indubitably mine,â 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 daughterâs 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 identityâthat oneâs skin color can tell us oneâs race, for instanceâdissolve in the face of realityâs manifold intricacies?…
Read the entire review here.