Description
Title: Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race
Author: Thomas Chatterton Williams
ISBN: 9780393608861
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 192
Condition: Used Copy
Publisher :
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 he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his kids are white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them–or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.
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