A Biracial Man’s Plea to End Racial Categorization

Self Portrait in Black and White by “biracial” author Thomas Chatterton Williams is a memoir that makes the case for doing away with the racial categorization of human beings. He shares how the USA’s hyperracialized society forced him as a young person to exclusively identify as Black. However, relocating to France; marrying a white French woman; and especially, becoming the father of white-presenting children has now demonstrated to him the myth of race.

As a first-generation Black/White biracial individual myself, I am able to relate to Williams’ frustration with the arbitrary racial categories that society tries to impose on us. Everyone should have the right to define oneself on one’s own terms; contrary to what seems to be popular belief, people of “mixed race” have that right too.

At the same time, there are aspects of Williams’ memoir that are arguably problematic, and do not resonate with me at all, including the author’s apparent obsession with blond hair and blue eyes; minimization of white racism; and disdain for “woke” anti-racist activism.

NAVIGATING “MIXEDNESS” IN A HYPERRACIALIZED SOCIETY

During his reminiscences, Thomas Chatterton Williams describes an incident at around age four in a grocery store, in New Jersey where he was raised. A middle-aged white woman makes a point of verbalizing her assumption that he and his brother were adopted, remarking to his white mother, “it must be so tough adopting those kids from the ghetto.” In this woman’s hyperracialized mindset, they couldn’t possibly be her biological children.

Yarong Xie and other scholars utilize the term “misrecognition” to describe these kinds of encounters, that is, “being disrespected or labelled in ways which do not accord with a person’s self-identify.” This also reminds me of my own similar experiences, for example, the many times that children at schools in England, upon seeing my white mother, firmly stated, “Clare’s adopted,” as if this was a fact. As a “Black biracial,” I wasn’t granted the courtesy of being asked “what are you?” To the contrary, an assumption was made about my personal circumstances regardless of whether it was truth or fiction.

Years later, I was at a social gathering at university when I discovered that one of my fellow university students had previously attended a secondary school in Liverpool (UK), where my mother was an English teacher. I shared that my mother taught at his school, indicating that he might know her; however, at first, the young white man was adamant that this wasn’t the case, seeming almost irritated by the idea. To his credit, he clearly gave the issue some more thought, returning a few minutes later, somewhat embarrassed, acknowledging “I just realized that your mother did teach me, I’m so sorry.”

RACE IS NOT REAL

A key theme of this memoir is Williams’ contention that race is a meaningless concept - from the arbitrariness of everyday racial labels to the absurd language used to denote so-called racial difference. Citing the prolific author Albert Murray, Williams makes the following observation:

“ ‘… any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black’ … But what does it say about us that the most common means we have to describe ourselves rely on categories that do not and cannot manifest on human flesh?”

As Williams correctly notes, in an historical context, the idea of race and racial categories is relatively recent: hierarchical racial categories were conveniently developed during the slavery/colonial era as a means to justify the oppression of so-called “inferior races.”

Additionally, in modern society, social psychologists have theorized that social categorization, by its very nature, is inextricably linked with bias and discrimination. Certainly, a case could be made that racial categorization persists today as a means to maintain hierarchies among different ethnic groups, typically with those classified as white being assigned the top position, and Black people being strategically placed at the bottom.

Furthermore, history has demonstrated that racial data can be used as a tool for racial oppression; in The Sociological Review, scholar Sharon Walker discusses the need for the “monitoring of ethnic monitoring.”

Similar to Williams, my existential situation challenges the very idea of “race.” At this time, I for one, will continue to select the “prefer not to say” option when asked for my ethnic background.

BABY’S GOT BLUE EYES

It’s not unreasonable to provide physical descriptions in a memoir about racial identity. That said, it is ironic - in a book purportedly about rejecting racial essentialism - that the author appears to be fixated with blue eyes and blond hair; the word “blond” appears in the text no less than 20 times.

Indeed, the sheer level of sycophantic “oohing and aahing” about blond hair and blue eyes brought to mind the cringeworthy lyrics “baby’s got blue eyes … blue eyes, ooh I love blue eyes” in the catchy Elton John tune “Blue Eyes,” a song which during the writing of this article – annoyingly – I couldn’t get out of my head.

Someone as well-read as Williams professes to be should be aware that the "blond hair blue eyes" trope is disproportionately and inappropriately glorified in Western culture, and is part and parcel of the very racial essentialism the author claims to want no part of. Moreover, he surely knows that this was one of Nazi Germany’s barometers for determining the worth of human beings.

Yet, Williams describes his own mother in ridiculously racially essentialist terms, declaring that she is “unambiguously white—blond-haired, blue-eyed, and descended on all sides from Northern European Protestant stock.” He goes on to gush over an old photo of his mother and her family:

“There are photos of my mother with the family that was hers before we became her own … Who is this brood, with all that blond hair bleached a blazing shade by the California sun?”

Additionally, throughout the book, there’s this sense that Williams is in awe of the fact that he has fathered children who have blond hair and blue eyes - that he’s actually related to these larger-than-life beings. He makes the following observation following the birth of his daughter:

“The sight of this blond-haired, blue-eyed, impossibly fair-skinned child shocked me—along with the knowledge that she was indubitably mine. On some deeply irrational but viscerally persuasive level, I think I feared that, like a modern Oedipus, I’d metaphorically slept with my white mother and killed my black dad.”

Later in his chronicles, Williams goes on to proclaim that his son is “a six-week-old Venetian blond, with even bluer eyes than his sister’s.” One can’t help wondering whether Williams subconsciously regards his children as trophies who serve to showcase his unexpressed Northern European genes. Indeed, the author goes so far as to ponder about the possibility that a solitary blond hair growing from his own clavicle is some signifier of that heritage:

“… a single, impossibly blond strand growing straight out of my clavicle and limply falling over my left pectoral, shimmering in the afternoon sun … the only one of its kind I have ever found anywhere on myself … no matter how many times I would later pluck it away, it always returns, an irrepressible vestige of some Viking—maybe even Neanderthal—genes biding their time, waiting for the chance to reemerge.”

Also worthy of mention is Williams’ professed shock regarding his daughter’s “white” appearance, which frankly comes across as disingenuous. He is not the first biracial person to marry a white person and have white-looking children, something which is neither surprising nor uncommon in the 21st century.

Certainly, there are biracial people - both known to me and in the public eye - who have white-presenting children. Similarly, there are plenty of “white” people out there who have biological parents of color. The British band Depeche Mode is at first glance lily-white; however, I recently learned that the songwriter/guitarist’s biological father is African-American, while the lead singer’s father is Malaysian.

IF I IGNORE RACISM, I CAN PRETEND THAT IT DOESN’T EXIST

Williams, who resides with his family in France shares with readers that he lives in a very white world, regularly finding himself “in rooms where not a single other soul is black.” He implies that this situation is acceptable to him, stating that France has “long functioned as a haven for American black people.”

However, some of the anecdotes that Williams describes regarding his life in France indicate that the people might not be as colorblind as he wants to believe. For example, Williams describes an occasion when his wife’s sister - upon meeting his then-infant “white” daughter for the first time - is seemingly incapable of seeing any resemblance between himself and his daughter:

“'Wow, but were you even in the room, or did Valentine [Williams’ wife] simply reproduce herself?' I laughed … but when we climbed back in the car I studied Marlow's face [Williams’ daughter] for traces of myself—which I did find there—and wondered why these remained so inscrutable to everyone else.”

In addition, Williams reveals that his grandmother-in-law, Genevieve, displays an ornamental Black slave’s head on her coffee table:

“And then there is that glistening dark brown skin of the antique that Genevieve keeps on the table in the living room … Genevieve keeps an astonishing, thick-lipped, bug-eyed porcelain head of a slave or servant woman on her coffee table … Whenever I am in the living room, I am incapable of denying it my attention.”

Williams acknowledges that the continued display of this porcelain monstrosity in his presence is distracting and would be considered a microaggression. However, the author’s response is to simply grin and bear it, because the insult is insignificant in comparison to “Genevieve’s warmth toward me and my family.”

While Williams is skilled at minimizing his racialized experiences with his wife’s family members, he is deeply critical of today’s “mainstream anti-racist discourse,” bizarrely blaming anti-racist activism (but not white racism) for perpetuating racial categorization.

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Ultimately, Black/White biracial individuals have an absolute right to self-definition and to not be bullied into accepting society’s arbitrary racial categories. However, in a world that is anti-black, this can sometimes lead to distancing oneself from blackness; seeking to assimilate into whiteness; and engaging in rhetoric which reinforces anti-blackness - something that Williams appears to be doing so spectacularly.

Originally published at DailyKos.com on March 4, 2024