Thomas Chatterton Williams: "The notion of race obsesses"

American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams.

© Grasset Publishing

Text by: Mikaël Ponge

10 mins

Contributor to the

New York Times

, the American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams stood out with his book

Self-portrait in black and white, unlearn the idea of ​​race

, published in 2019. Published today in French by Editions Grasset, he defends in this essay the idea of ​​going beyond the notion of race. 

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: In this book, your reflection on this notion of race becomes part of your story.

You have been living in France for 10 years.

Born of a black father, a white mother, you grow up far from black ghettos.

And yet you manage to convince yourself of the weight of your black identity.

For example, you only have black girlfriends until you meet one, the one who will become the mother of your child, a white French woman.

Your book opens with the birth of this little girl, Malow, a child with white skin and blue eyes.

And it's a shock to you.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

It was a shock to me.

I grew up with a very American conception of race, a binary conception: you are white or you are black, and a single drop of black blood makes you black.

It is a tradition and a legal status inherited from slavery.

Until I was 19, in the 2000s, it was not even possible in census questionnaires to tick several boxes about our racial identity.

You had to choose.

So I knew I was mixed race, with a black father and a white mother, but that still made me black and so I assumed that my children would be mixed race certainly, but black like me.

You even come to wonder if this child is not the sign of your betrayal at your camp.

I felt it a bit like a betrayal, to a kind of historical debt to which I felt connected, and to which I am still connected today.

But I didn't have the words to break out of this way of thinking that I grew up with when my daughter was born.

The shock of his birth really made me realize for the first time the imagination linked to race, and it took me a while afterwards to imagine how these categories could be replaced by something more human.

Thus, you denounce the obsession with this notion of race, the fruit of a story that you believe is a burden.

You quote Camus

: history is not everything.

What do you mean

?

There is a very beautiful sentence from Camus which says: "

 Poverty and history have taught me that all is not good under the sun, but the sun has taught me that history is not everything. . 

I'm paraphrasing, but I think that's the underlying idea.

Sometimes you are so locked in the wounds of the past that you miss the gift of being alive, the present and the possibilities that this present gives you to reinvent yourself, to create something new.

And therefore go beyond this notion of race?

I think you can't do this yourself.

Obviously, it is a negotiation between you and the company to establish your identity.

But I believe that we can decide to unlearn some of the notions that we have chosen to establish and learn.

Race does not exist biologically.

We created this notion and many of us understand, I believe, that there is something wrong with this way of organizing the world.

We can dare to imagine another way of doing things.

In your opinion, in the United States, the concepts of race and social class are too often confused.

You tell an anecdote in your book

: you were campaigning for Barack Obama in Baltimore in 2008, and the African Americans you met didn't see you as black.

This trip to Baltimore opened my eyes.

In the United States, we don't have a very sophisticated way of talking about social class.

Classes are race, and vice versa.

People tend to believe that being black is a block of suffering, often poverty, while being white means being privileged.

And the reality of life in the United States in 2021 is much more complicated than that.

I'm lucky to have a college degree, educated parents, and on this trip to a very poor part of Baltimore, I realized that people didn't really care that I had to. black blood.

They did not feel that we were sharing the same experience.

They saw us as strangers, from another social class, a status that could not be transcended.

You are not denying what the black community is going through in the United States.

We are in the midst of a trial against Derek Chauvin, the white policeman involved in the death of George Floyd.

On this subject you write: " 

I have no reason to fear that this will happen to Marlow 

".

And this is a relief for you.

What I meant is that there is definitely a bias based on skin color and more violence against African Americans by the police.

To stick to reality, I should have said: " 

It is true that in the United States anyone can be killed by the police 

".

Of about a thousand people killed by police each year, 250 are black, which is twice as much as the white population.

So it's kinda easy to say this won't happen to my daughter, but it won't happen to her because of her race.

That's what I wanted to say.

What happened to George Floyd would not happen to the majority of African Americans, and it would probably never happen to African Americans of a certain social class.

George Floyd wasn't just a black man killed by the police, he was a poor black man.

He was confronted by the police because he had no money and used a fake banknote.

So we also have to take into account the issue of poverty in the way George Floyd was treated.

If we want to understand what happened, we must learn to separate this issue from the general discourse on race.

An aspect undoubtedly less put forward by Black Lives Matter.

You share the objectives of this movement but not its speech.

Why ?

I agree that there are many aspects of American policing that need to be reformed.

It is an extremely brutal police force when compared to that of other rich countries.

So, I believe that this movement for the lives of blacks has raised awareness of the violence perpetrated in the name of law in American society.

What I don't share is that the talk is all about separate racial identities, it reinforces the idea that there are white lives and black lives, and that these lives are different.

On the contrary, I believe there are values ​​we should all share and uphold, and when police target black people or put their lives in danger, we should share that same need as Americans to reform our institutions.

I believe that essentializing the differences and reducing all the talk to black lives alone takes us back instead of pushing us forward, as Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement did, with a universal vision of l 'humanity.

In the Netherlands, the controversy recently got the better of the white translator chosen to translate the poem by African-American Amanda Gorman delivered on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration.

A white person, it has been said, cannot transcribe the voice of an African American.

What is your opinion on this subject ?

First, it's a very regressive way of looking at what our common humanity allows us to do and looking at the purpose of literature and art in general.

Alain Mabankou

has a very good answer to that, that's exactly what I think: the goal of literature is to go beyond identities.

The idea that a translator cannot understand what an African American in Los Angeles is trying to say, it means that a Catalan translator in Spain cannot translate Homer or Shakespeare because he did not live in ancient Greece or 16th century England.

We know that makes no sense, but now the subject has become so sensitive that we are afraid to simply say: “

 I am human above all, nothing that is human is foreign to me.

 We lost the sense of that.

In France, we are currently debating the subject of racialized, single-sex meetings at university.

You who live here in France, how the American that you are, do you position yourself on this subject?

It makes me extremely sad.

It is a kind of neo-segregationism.

My father experienced real segregation in Texas.

Imagining that we could reproduce this voluntarily, that seems to me to be a big step backwards which takes us away from the objective which is to live together, to understand each other instead of glorifying our differences.

So whether in France or the United States, the idea of ​​reintroducing the desire to separate races always pains me a lot.

As you call for going beyond the notion of race.

But don't you feel like you're alone in this fight

?

No (laughs).

I do not represent the majority, but I think this idea of ​​rejecting the notion of race speaks to a lot.

There are a few other writers, like James Baldwin, a writer who lived in France and spoke of disillusionment about this obsession with skin color, so you know, it's impossible to imagine a future without race, but we must imagine the impossible for the sake of our children.

It is true, however, that at the moment it is a point that we are little to defend.

We are at a time when the notion of race is obsessed.

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