In the most recent episode of Hardly Working, Brent Orrell was joined by AEI nonresident fellow and cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams. Williams’s two books, Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture (2010) and Self Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race (2019), tie together personal memoir and philosophy to provide a fresh perspective on America’s past and present reckoning with defining race and its impacts on our society. Williams discusses the importance of liberal arts education in shaping his own vocation, his motivation for writing, and importantly, his philosophy on race and identity in America.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. You can find a full transcript of the episode here.

Orrell: Something
that struck me in Self-Portrait in Black and White is this porous connection
between life and philosophy. How did you find your way into this vocation of
writing philosophical works that are so interwoven with your own story?

Williams: I studied philosophy at Georgetown, and
initially thought that I’d like to stay in the academy and read philosophy for
the rest of my life. But at some point, a professor told me I’d have to be
really sure that I’d be happy and content reaching fewer readers than I might
realize.

I thought about that a lot. I thought about the type of
writing I wanted to do. Eventually I found my way to NYU, where I studied
cultural reporting and criticism in the graduate Department of Journalism. And
it seemed to me a way to satisfy [my desire to write] about ideas and reading
that I always wanted to do, but to have a chance to do it in more mainstream
ways that could potentially reach more readers.

When I was at NYU, I had a wonderful teacher named
Katie Roiphe, who is an excellent writer. Her class was on polemics. An
assignment she gave us was to write an op-ed. I wrote an argument against the
kind of gravitational pull that street culture can have on Black American
identity. Certainly the way that I felt growing up, there was quite a lot of pressure
to conform to certain ideas of racial authenticity.

The piece was good enough that she said it should be
published. It almost went to The New York Times, but they passed for some
reason. I just sent it in frustration to The Washington Post, and they ran it.
Suddenly, I was able to talk to agents and to realize that I could expand it
into a book.

What year was
that?

2007. I was still in school for another year. But I got
an agent, and I was expanding the essay into a book. When we went to sell the
book, I found that the things the editors found most gripping and important
were these little anecdotes when I heard from my father.

In writing that book, I learned to use myself as a kind
of prism for certain ideas. I found that to be a natural fit for the way I
wanted to write. I didn’t go into selling the book knowing I wanted to write a
memoir, but it became a natural mode for me.

Do you ever think
about going back to the longer form work? Most philosophers are not terribly
influential while they’re alive. After they’re gone, their work resurfaces. And
I’m wondering if you think about that in terms of writing something for a
narrower audience of people who are engaged purely in chasing ideas?

The book I’m working on now is not a personal book. I’m
trying to write a history of ideas that led to the kind of paradigm shift of
2020 — trying to make sense of that, culminating in a defense of classical liberalism.
I think there’s a creeping illiberalism on both the right and the left that’s
concerning.

So I’m trying to have a kind of conversation that’s not
just rooted in the personal and that’s not too stuck in the present moment,
either. But I also still would like to reach as many readers as possible.
There’s a part of me that regrets not having gotten a Ph.D. in philosophy. I’m
40 now, and so I know I’m not going to do that. I’m kind of reconciled to being
an autodidact kind of philosopher, the way my father was and the way that
people were for many centuries before credentialism.

I try to take seriously the idea that a philosopher is
somebody who’s asking certain questions looking for meaning. And so I’m not an
academic philosopher, but I’m still drawn to being a person who works with
ideas in a very serious way. I wouldn’t strictly call myself a journalist, and
I wouldn’t call myself a memoirist. I guess writer is the most natural fit. I
try to be a writer who’s philosophizing in the way that such writing has been
done throughout our history.

You brought up
your dad who figures prominently in your life, but also in your thought. Can
you talk about your dad’s tutoring business, if that’s the right word?

Well, he’s interesting. I was trying to evoke what my
father was doing in our house, which was supporting us by having students come
and sit with him informally in the living room and study.

He worked with students to prepare them for SAT tests, AP
exams, and things like that. But what he was really doing was running a kind of
academy where people were reading lots of philosophy and having a Socratic
dialogue. And, you know, in the process, they were coming out equipped to get
an 800 on their verbal score or something like that.

He has a Ph.D. in sociology and, like me, he never wanted to stay in the academy. During the Great Society, he was studying programs and then got very disillusioned with that. The home study business was a temporary move to pay the rent but it became a kind of a vocation for him.

My piece in The New York Times Magazine starts in my father’s childhood because he was born in 1937 in the segregated South. He’s in Texas. No one in his family is educated. And he happened upon a book at a neighbor’s property, a copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. He asked his neighbor if he could have it, and he gave it to him.

He was struck by Durant’s portrait of Socrates. And he
wondered why this guy was so important. And that eventually led him to Plato’s
dialogues where he found this kind of knowledge transported him out of his immediate
surroundings and across time. He participated in the universal. This saved his
life and got him out of his very limited circumstances that he had been thrust
into — allowed him to use the gifts that he had. And that became very
inspirational to me.

But he also put
you through this process, right?

My brother and I were captive live-in students in his
informal academy. And, you know, that saved us because we were in an
environment where a lot of people weren’t thinking very hard about their
futures. My dad treated our education as a matter of life and death. He took it
seriously the way that immigrants take seriously educating their children.

It’s not
somebody on the outside shaping people so much as this encounter with ideas
often that causes this kind of cognitive shift where the imagination opens up.
Can you make the case for me? Why should anybody care about the exploration of
these classic texts? What’s in it for them?

Now more than ever, it should be pretty obvious that we
need to know how to live well. We need to know what the good life is; we need
to know what the ethical life is. Pure technical competence taken to its end is
Mark Zuckerberg. He can do anything he wants, and look what he wants to do. And
look what our world is becoming. Look what happens when you don’t have the kind
of ideas that make you understand what you should
be pursuing. You’re just pursuing technical ends because that’s what you’re
able to do.

We’re going to have extraordinarily complicated and
scary bioethical questions sooner than we’d like to think about what we’ll be
able to do with our own babies, but also what we’ll be able to do with animals.
We have to think through what we can do with the capabilities we have through
scientific and technical knowledge. We need to understand how people figured
out these questions in the past, why some ideas are timeless, why human nature
essentially stays the same.

These are profoundly important questions, and we don’t
have the kind of stabilizing institutions that we once could take for granted. You
know, we don’t all agree on a faith or any of these things that give us a kind
of moral grounding. But we do have these books and this tradition that teaches
us how to think and how to live — if we’re open to exploring that tradition and
taking it seriously.

My experience
among Americans is that we want to see as direct a connection as possible
between the education we’re receiving and the economic outcome that we’re
pursuing. That is the only shared definition for the good life we have, the
American dream. You live in France. Is that true of your experience there?

I think the French are different than Americans in that
they don’t have an equivalent of the American dream, first of all. They also have
a kind of reverence for non-practical ends and non-practical goods. One of
those is the continuity of cultural and intellectual traditions. And they have
a respect for the humanities that never met with a kind of criticism. You don’t
have this [American] kind of popular anti-intellectualism that’s considered
pragmatic.

There are some good pragmatic things that come out of
America. But I do think when we look at Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, we have to
wonder: Don’t we need some artists, and some philosophers, and some ethicists
engaging with these very powerful people and organizations that are posing new
questions and new risks?

Let’s get into
your book, Self-Portrait in Black and White. Why did you write it? I gather
that you have undergone a pretty profound transition in your own thinking about
yourself, about race, and about racial categories. So walk everybody through
that story, and how it culminated in your book.

So my father’s descended from African slaves in the
American South, and my mother is descended from mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants
and grew up out west. Father would be called Black in American society, my
mother would be called white.

Culturally, I grew up the way that we tend to do in
America, defining myself as Black even though my mother is white — consistent
with the American idea that a drop of Black blood makes a person Black.

Both of my parents have an ambivalent view about this
because they always taught us that race isn’t biologically real or meaningful.
But they also knew we would be racialized as Black in American society in the
way that Obama talked about race. And so it was important for us to understand
that and to embrace it. And that’s how I grew up. White kids didn’t think I was
white. Black kids were fully comfortable accepting all manner of physical characteristics
under the umbrella of blackness.

It wasn’t until I was 29, and I was engaged to my wife,
who’s from Paris, blond-haired and blue-eyed much the same way my mother is,
that I started to realize that I might have children that would challenge my
notion of racial categories.

But then I kind of put that idea out of my head. I
wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that my children would be Black.
And it was a kind of last-gasp argument I realized for an audience of one, and
that was myself. I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t giving up
anything.

When we had our daughter, especially living in France,
where people didn’t start with the same one drop assumptions that I had grown
up in, I was aware that I wouldn’t be able to so simplistically send her out
into the world, simply telling people that she was Black, and that’d be the end
of the conversation.

It was never that I thought that I had a white daughter.
[Instead,] I immediately lost the ability to believe in these categories. I
felt that they could not capture my daughter, and then I felt, by extension,
they couldn’t capture me. And I started to suspect they couldn’t capture
actually the complexity of these multi-ethnic societies we increasingly
inhabit.

This idea of the
single drop that makes someone Black or white is you think a peculiarly
American idea?

I don’t know of another society that so rigidly
enforces the law of hypodescent and the cultural custom of the one-drop rule.
In the Caribbean — you know, in Martinique or places like that — it’s not that
they didn’t think that mixed people could be not white. But they had, for
example, 36 words for all of the different kinds of mixtures. There’s a
spectrum.

These are highly hierarchical and deeply troubling
linguistic customs. Language is how we think and structure the world. It’s a
way of denigrating being descended from Africa. This is present all over where
slavery touched societies.

The one-drop rule certainly doesn’t exist in Africa.
And it really doesn’t exist in Europe. So there’s not the kind of feverish,
defensive white purity that existed in America because whiteness equals freedom
and blackness equals unfreedom in American heritage.

But in other slave societies like Brazil, it’s just the
opposite because they had so many African-descendant people in their society,
and they tried to do this kind of forced whitening. You had this
extraordinarily large, mixed-race population. And very quickly, it came to be
the custom that any amount of white blood made you not Black — the reverse
one-drop custom. There’s always the kind of denigration of being African-descended
because that’s linked to unfreedom. It’s a class oppression first and foremost.

How does this
confusion over race categories play out in that context?

Whites didn’t think of themselves in terms of
monolithic whiteness either until quite recently. You know, it was very
recently that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants did not consider people from southern
Mediterranean countries to be racially in the same group as them. And even in
northern Europe, they didn’t consider Celtics to be racially in the same group
as them as Anglo-Saxons. There was quite a lot of rejection of the idea that
the Irish were the same as the English.

And then we see in
the current context, you know, you have many, many immigrants from Central and
South America to the United States who after a couple of generations . . .

See themselves as white. And that’s why I’ve always
thought that, you know, this idea that demography is destiny is too simplistic.

Going back to
France, in your experience France doesn’t have this one drop problem. [But
that’s] not the same thing as saying that France doesn’t have race problems.
What aspects would you say are better?

There’s no utopia. I’ve lived in France for 10 years. I
think that there are aspects of a multi-ethnic society that France and other
European countries do better. And I think that frankly, there are ways of
making a multi-ethnic society that America does do a lot better. I think on
paper, France does it better in theory.

What aspects
would you say are better?

They’ve gotten rid of the word race in all of their
official communication. It is not a legally valid concept. We reify the
abstraction of race in America. But people in America live more integrated
lives than people in France do. Even though on paper, everyone’s a French
citizen, every inmate in a French prison is French.

This has to be the way you would want to get to
organizing a society where you wouldn’t essentialize so-called racial
differences and make them meaningful. I want racial differences — your physical
characteristics — to tell me as little as possible about who you are as an
individual. France rhetorically goes towards that. But the French live
extraordinarily segregated lives.

A typical
response of a white American who is secretly harboring racist feelings is to
say, “I don’t see color.” And that actually is, in many instances, very
offensive to the person to whom it is being said. It almost feels like a no-win
situation.

It’s complicated because, as in many things, it matters
what they mean when they say that. It’s not the words. There’s a way of not
seeing color that’s exactly what we should be getting to. I think that’s what
Martin Luther King Jr. meant, [and this] has been misunderstood or
oversimplified in the decades since.

In my book, I talk about when my white cousin in
California jumps straight to, “I don’t see color,” that’s an evasion. She
doesn’t want to actually grapple with difficult histories. She doesn’t want to
take a moment to think about the way that people are racialized in society
could be significant.

We don’t have an eye color-conscious society or hair
color-conscious society. I’d like to get to the point where the melanin in the
epidermis is as significant as the melanin in the iris. And I think we could
get there. But we can’t get there by being facile about it.

Talk about the
right way of attempting to get to the end that you’re describing, which is that
we don’t impute much of anything through these characteristics. How would we go
about doing that?

In America, race is classed, and class is often raced.
People interact as equals when they meet each other as equals. People
understand each other’s humanity the best when they meet on equal terms and
with dignity. How does that happen? This means that we have to address problems
of class that are — for historical reasons, and now for self-perpetuating
cultural reasons — intertwined with what we mistakenly think is race.

There’s also an enormous amount of white poverty. And
that’s also having profound implications for the health of our democracy. At
some point, we have to figure out how to make people meet each other with
dignity and on reasonably equal terms.

And by equal terms, I don’t mean that everybody gets
Mark Zuckerberg’s level of wealth. But I mean that people have to be able to be
reasonably confident that they can get sick, and it won’t bankrupt them. People
have to actually be able to have children and provide care for their children
so that they can work. People have to be able to have access to a good
education. I mean, these are things that happen a lot better in many Western
European societies.

We’ve tolerated quite a lot of class inequality, and
that happens to be overlapped with a kind of racial identity, but it’s not the
same exact thing which leads us into the identity conversation. [Focusing on
race] is a way of missing the larger point that what would actually heal the
society is not by always emphasizing the racial difference. Rather, at some
point, we have to take care of the gross inequality that exists.

Blacks have
struggled with the consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination and experienced
many negative outcomes as a result. Poor whites haven’t had the same inputs, as
it were, but they still have very similar pathologies. That should be pointing
us toward common solutions. There’s a lot more common ground there than I think
is generally recognized.

I agree. And, you know, I think that we came to a point
where we’re defying common sense to say you can have generation upon generation
upon generation of poverty without it creating patterns of behavior that would
be passed on and difficult to break out of.

It is difficult to talk about these problems in the
dispassionate way that’s needed. In many ways, this debate has become too
emotional. To get solutions, we have to kind of tamp down the emotional
response and just be open to uncomfortable conversations. And this isn’t
happening when we talk about poor whites or poor Blacks.

But there’s
almost a sense that because low-income whites were complicit in the webs of
discrimination against Blacks, that they somehow don’t deserve recognition,
even if it was [perpetrated by] their great, great grandparents. White poverty
is part of the punishment for having participated in [discrimination].

Yes, but there’s a punishment for all of us when then
you have an opioid crisis, or you have a kind of reactionary politics that
simply wants to break things. We are in a society together, and so it’s in all
of our interest to lift the lowest levels as high as possible.

We’re so
dependent upon these categories, even for the analysis of social problems that
we’re interested in trying to fix. Is it actually possible to disentangle this?
Is it desirable to try to disentangle this completely if we’re serious about coming
up with solutions that are directed toward people who are in need?

It’s a good question. They don’t measure these things
in France, and so it’s difficult to know certain problems — for example, how to
talk about bias in the criminal justice system in France because you can’t
measure [how] Arabs are disproportionately represented.

So there is statistical value in some of these illusory
names, but I don’t think this means that we have to have a mainstream
conversation that acts as though these are real categories. You could use the
term Black in a way that doesn’t reify the concept of race. It could just be a
descriptor.

I think you also would get a lot of solutions if you
took demographic categories like location into account, as [the French] do. So
affirmative action in France has been tried based on zip code. You can
prioritize access by certain underprivileged neighborhoods. And that actually
gets a lot of the same solution, but it doesn’t reify concepts of racial
difference.

I’m not an expert on this. But I think that we need to
be more imaginative so we don’t keep reproducing the logic of the plantation,
which I don’t think serves us well. I’d be more willing to err on the side of
getting rid of racialization and trying to find new ways to lift struggling people
and fix inequality.

Do I believe that there’s real racism in American
society still? Yeah, I do, absolutely. I don’t know how that plays itself out.
I also believe that the US [I live in] is an entirely different country [from
what] my father lived in. And so the way the racialized conversation goes —
where racism is permanent, intractable, and maximally oppressive — never gets
to a solution because it doesn’t recognize the extraordinary progress we’ve
made.

None of this
data that poor whites and poor Blacks look an awful lot alike in terms of their
socio-economic outcomes is in any way [meant to] underplay the historical
weight and gravity of the discrimination that Blacks have faced in American
society. [That] is an absolute reality.

It’s a matter of historical fact. I think we can all
recognize that. At some point, though, we do have to get out of the past and
get into the present and hopefully into the future.

So it’s All
Saints Day. We know about your dad. But can you talk about the other saints in
your life who were there offering those words of encouragement or tangible
supports?

That’s certainly my mother. I was very fortunate to
have parents that didn’t just tell me to work hard and do my best, and that
they valued me regardless. They also told me to do what I believed was
worthwhile and not to just do what would please them. Or, as my mother told me
always, “To thine own self be true.” And she really meant it. And she really
supported me. My mother is a kind of secular saint in my life — selfless, the
glue of the family.

And then, you know, there are the literary saints that
you encounter. You don’t know them personally, but you know them on the page. James
Baldwin in his essays, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” talks
about being in Europe, and realizing he has more in common with this white GI
from Texas than he will ever have in common with the Frenchman or the African
here.

Something happened in America. We are a people over here, and we need to learn how to live together. James Baldwin thought that the solution was love. Now, you’d get laughed out of the room today saying that, but I think he was right. And he said, “You know, I want to be a good writer, and I want to be a decent man.” That’s the best advice there is.

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