Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race - Hardcover

"Thomas Chatterton Williams' Self-Portrait in Black and White is a gorgeously written and deeply knowledgeable account of fatherhood, identity, and race. Tender and probing, respectful of intellectual disagreement and of the raw emotions these subjects can stir, it nevertheless proceeds fearlessly and rigorously toward his own original and challenging conclusions. This is a book that will surely provoke, inform, and move readers, regardless of where they stand on the political and philosophical divide." -- Phil Klay, author of Redeployment "Williams has the essential things a writer needs-command of language, complexity and depth of thought, and, maybe above all, courage. In Self-Portrait in Black and White he sticks his neck way out in pursuit of unfashionable, necessary truths. This book brings a blast of fresh air that will change your thinking about race in America." -- George Packer, author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a "black" father from the segregated South and a "white" mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of "black blood" makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he'd never rigorously reflected on its foundations-but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions. "It is not that I have come to believe that I am no longer black or that my daughter is white," Williams writes. "It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of us." Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.