Thomas Chatterton Williams

- A case for unlearning race, this week on "Firing Line."

- We should try to work towards a society where how you look and how I look tells you as little important information about me as an individual as possible.

- [Margaret] The son of a white mother and a black father, Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up identifying as black.

But the birth of his own child in 2013 upended his perception of race.

- She forced me to confront the fiction of race in a way that I never had before in my own sense of self.

- [Margaret] The cultural critic, author and podcast host now lives as an expat in Paris, but spends his time exploring themes of race and identity in America.

He asks fundamental questions like: Can Americans retire from race?

Has cancel culture gone too far?

[protestors shouting] And what does it really mean to be woke?

- We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.

Florida is where woke goes to die.

- This has become a rallying cry.

It's a branding tactic.

- [Margaret] With culture wars already at the forefront of the 2024 battleground, what does Thomas Chatterton Williams say now?

- [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Charles R. Schwab, The Fairweather Foundation, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, the Asness Family Foundation, Jeffrey and Lisa Bewkes, Peter and Mary Kalikow, and by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Damon Button, the Center for the Study of the International Economy Inc, the Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library, and The Marc Haas Foundation.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. - Thomas Chatterton Williams, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure.

- You're a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at Bard College.

You have written two memoirs, the most recent titled "Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race."

You're the son of a white mother and a black father from the South.

And you grew up identifying as black.

In fact, in 2012, you wrote that mixed-race people have, quote, "an ethical obligation to identify as black."

But then the following year, something fundamentally changed in your life with the birth of your daughter.

How did that moment alter your perception of race?

- Yeah, I mean, one of the things you have to do over the course of a life is revisit views you've grown up with and held closely and even thought of as core to your identity as, I think, facts and new information change where you become exposed to new perspectives.

And so I grew up very much within this very American idea that a drop of black blood makes a person black because they're disqualified from being white.

You know, this is a slave custom.

This is logic from the plantation.

But it also became a source of pride and solidarity within the black community that I was very proud to be a member of.

And so even though I had grown up in a household with a white mother and a black father, I had a very straightforward sense of racial identity as a child and as a young man, which was simply that I was a black man of mixed-race heritage, which was not such a strange thing in American history.

So the birth of my daughter was the first time that I had to put that idea that a drop of black blood makes a person black, and we must think of race as a binary either-or into real-life practice in a way that I didn't with myself.

My daughter was colored in a way where most people who would encounter her would not suspect that she was mixed.

It wouldn't be self-evident.

And so she forced me to confront the fiction of race in a way that I never had before in my own sense of self.

And, you know, it wasn't that I thought, here I have a white daughter.

It was that I thought if I'm a black man who can have a daughter who looks like this and she's a white-looking girl who can be almost a quarter West African descended, then what are these categories that we all adhere to even really mean?

- The subtitle of your book is "Unlearning Race."

But you also recognize this complete rethinking of race is not something that can happen easily or quickly.

In practical terms, what are you hoping to accomplish by telling your story?

- That's a really well-put question because I think that when you make these kinds of arguments, a lot of people think that you're saying, let's just not see race, let's pretend not to see race, and then all of our problems will disappear.

And that's overly simplistic.

And that's certainly not something that I would suggest.

What I'm trying to say is that I think that we should try to work towards a society where how you look and how I look tells you as little important information about me as an individual as possible.

I don't think that we can get to a society where we don't notice physical differences, human differences.

Those will always be with us.

But we can change the importance that we attribute to those physical differences and the conclusions we draw from those things.

- How possible do you think that is?

How practical do you think that aspiration is?

- Well, I would never say that it's easy or it's going to happen overnight.

But society changes in profound ways over time.

And I've been really inspired by the degree to which we've been able to change the way we think about same sex marriage, the way we've considered that gender can be a far more complicated discussion than we've previously had.

I think that we can live in a multiethnic society where we say to each other, you know, what unites us is a common Americanness, and we all come from different places, and we really don't stand on firm footing when we think that we can make assumptions about other people based on how they appear.

I think we can get to that.

- So I don't need to tell you what the critics have said.

A lot of people have a lot to say about this period about your book.

- Oh yeah.

- One review of the memoir in the "Los Angeles Review of Books" said, quote, "William's account of his life reveals a man who never had a natural, easy, or instinctive connection to black people, just one in which, by his own admission, he imitated what he saw black people doing on BET."

So the reviewer suggests that as a result, abandoning racial identity was perhaps easier for you than it would be for others.

Where are they wrong?

- Well, they're wrong from the jump because, I mean, you're looking at somebody who, to a highly disproportionate degree, worships his black father who had a profoundly black American experience.

Born in 1937 in the segregated South, a self-made autodidact who really modeled for me a kind of American integrity that is fundamentally influenced by the African American experience.

So, you know, I didn't have a large extended black family.

And some of the cultural tropes I identified with through BET, I came in later years to understand were really, you know, they were class associations that I was identifying with.

I was trying to perform a kind of class behavior that seemed very seductive to me.

And I'm not alone.

You know, the culture that I was caught up in is a quite popular culture.

But the idea that, you know, dissociating from blackness is something that comes easy to me because black people don't mean anything to me is just something that, you know, I reject wholeheartedly.

- Your father, as you mentioned, grew up in the segregated South.

Your brother was even once beaten by police officers.

But you write, quote, "To my knowledge, in my adult life, I've never been harmed by my appearance or lineage."

Is there something to the criticism that your prescription for unlearning race might not translate for a black person who has experienced more severe and overt and consistent racism?

- I think that we have to be honest about the fact that, you know, colorism is real.

And so the idea that lighter, more Eurocentric-appearing black Americans have experiences that are not exactly the same as darker-skinned black Americans because of a kind of ambient skin racism, there's something to that.

I don't deny that.

But, you know, I'm not alone in this idea that if we're going to achieve the kind of multiethnic society we purport to want to achieve, that we're going to have to go beyond the kind of, you know, doubling down on racial categories that come out of slavery.

You don't have to have lighter skin to make the argument, but I wouldn't deny that it might be a little bit easier.

- For Americans and black Americans especially, you know, racial identity is inextricably linked to the history of subjugation, discrimination, and the struggle to overcome it.

You don't think that abandoning race should mean letting America forget the sins of slavery and oppression?

- No, not at all.

- [Margaret] So square it for me.

- Sure.

I think that we can do two things at once.

You know, we certainly have to know where we came from.

But we actually cannot allow ourselves to be imprisoned by the sense that the bad things that have happened to us in the past to trap the present and to kidnap and hold hostage the future.

There's this sense that has become quite popular in recent years that past discrimination necessitates present discrimination, which necessitates future discrimination.

As far as I can see, you're caught up in a cycle that can never quite be made whole because you're literally saying that you can not be made whole without interventions that constantly produce new winners and losers.

I think the past is really important.

We have to take it seriously.

But I'm interested in looking forward and imagining a kind of new future.

- The death of Tyre Nichols, after being beaten by black Memphis police officers in January, has drawn new attention to police violence.

And you've questioned whether Black Lives Matters' focus on race is the correct approach to solving the problem of police violence.

And I wonder if an incident like this reinforces your reservations about confronting these issues through a racial lens?

- Well, it did.

I mean, I think most people are horrified by what they saw in this video.

I mean, it was so bad, and I've seen enough that I couldn't watch the video, but I understand.

I understand what happened.

I have seen arguments be advanced that that itself was just a further instance of white supremacy, that you don't have to be white to be an agent of white supremacy.

I think that that takes an issue that most people could rally around, which is that the police in America are extraordinarily brutal and violent, much more so than other wealthy nations that we're compared to in Western Europe and elsewhere.

I think that we could have a serious conversation and a useful conversation that could bring us all together about how we don't want to live in a society where Americans of any ethnicity or background can be destroyed.

And so while I understand that there was a need to highlight the fact that black people disproportionately suffer this response, I think we need to make the conversation go further than that.

And that's really how we're going to solve some of these issues.

- You volunteered for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign to canvas in some neighborhoods in Baltimore that were incredibly challenging neighborhoods for you to visit.

Tell me how that experience shaped your thinking about race and economic mobility.

- Yeah, I was young, I was in my... You know, that was the first political campaign I truly became excited about.

We're talking about 2008.

I was a few years out of college.

I went with two friends, one a buddy of mine from Georgetown, Jewish American, one of my best friends, and one a German friend who was working in New York.

I became really, really excited by the possibility of this man's campaign, the kind of healing that his presence did seem to be offering the country.

And so, you know, we signed up to canvas in West Baltimore.

And I grew up in New Jersey, not far from Newark, New Jersey, and I had still never seen a level of American poverty like what I witnessed going around those neighborhoods in West Baltimore.

It was astonishing to me as a lifelong American citizen.

People were so cut off from concerns like choosing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.

I'm talking about, you're knocking on people's doors who had never heard of Hillary Clinton.

And I left wondering how the people answering their doors would think that the thing that unified me and them, the racial ancestry, was more significant than all of the other class and educational markers that united me with my Jewish friend and my German friend.

I don't think that they saw me and said, "Hey, me and him are all in the same boat and the other people are out of the boat."

And, you know, that was an eye-opening experience for me.

That's the first time that I realized that I thought of myself as embodying a kind of monolithic blackness.

And I don't want to come across as naive.

You know, I'm in my 20s.

But I hadn't really thought profoundly about what it means to be in the black middle class and what that had opened up access for me to escape.

- Let's take it to contemporary politics now.

Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip "Dilbert," sparked controversy recently after declaring that black Americans are a hate group and urged white people to, quote, "get the hell away from them."

In response, the comic was dropped from hundreds of newspapers, and some critics of cancel culture have come to Adams' defense, and you have decidedly not.

In response to the controversy, you tweeted, quote, "This is not cancel culture.

If you film yourself going on a stupid and boring racist monologue and upload it to the internet and people notice it and react negatively, you just have to play it as it lays."

- I think that's fair.

I mean, I would never be opposed to his freedom of speech.

He has the right to express himself.

But, you know, you put yourself into the arena and you can't expect that nobody will actually take issue with what you said when it's highly objectionable.

- You're opposed to the teaching of the ideas of critical race theory, and this whole philosophy of anti-racism in schools, but you've also made clear that you don't support Republican-led efforts to ban it.

What's wrong with that approach?

- Well, it is true that, you know, there's something really wrong going on in some of these schools, some of these elite private schools in New York City where kids are being told to take privilege walks, to break into groups based on race, Chinese kids sit with the Chinese kids, black kids with black kids, Jewish kids with the Jewish kids, as young as eight years old at some of these schools.

There's something wrong with that.

However, I don't think that, you know, I don't think that you can respond to bad ideas with an authoritarian impulse to ban.

That type of censoriousness should bother all people that are committed to an open society and the liberal exchange of ideas.

What's going on in Florida, what's going on in a lot of these regions of the country where you're getting into situations where teachers are not sure if they can teach "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" because it might violate some new law.

This should trouble us all.

- "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King's most famous letter that he wrote when he was in jail in Birmingham, of course, during the Civil Rights Movement.

- That might violate some of the new anti-CRT legislation that's popping up daily around this country.

- And 18 states have passed anti-CRT laws.

I like this quote.

You've described anti-racism as a moral panic similar to the satanic panic of the 1980s.

What do you think it takes to break the mindset?

- That's a good question.

When you say anti-racism, you know, a lot of well-meaning people say, "Well, what's wrong with that?"

I'm certainly, you know, anti-racist in the sense that I think racism is terrible.

But anti-racism as a movement, as it's been marketed and sold in the past few years, it's gotten locked into a mindset that race is the primary lens through which every question can be considered, and that our fundamental duty is to uncover racism and oppression everywhere it is, and to counteract it.

I don't think that's how human reality actually works.

I think that a lot of us are motivated by all types of ambiguous factors and that we are not necessarily always operating on a binary of oppressor and oppressed.

- Another term is this term "woke."

- Yeah.

- What do you understand about the origins of the concept of wokeness?

- The word, like a lot of black slang, the word, it's great.

I mean, I understand why it caught on so widely because it just works so much better than "awake."

Or, you know, it just does something that makes vivid the idea that, like, be conscious, be aware.

That's how it started out.

I don't think, you know, anybody disputes that.

- Be specifically aware of what?

- You know, be aware of any type of, you know.

Don't be asleep when, you know, there's inequality in the society.

It doesn't even have to be racialized inequality.

Just be more aware.

Don't sleepwalk through life and just, you know, do your part to contribute to a status quo that is less than it could be.

Do your part, you know?

- Yeah.

- Nothing wrong with that.

But then, you know, it became a term that critics of the kind of excesses that we were talking about in terms of the anti-racist kind of moral panic, and also like questions having to do with sexuality and gender, and climate, and class and other things.

Critics of the excesses of these movements, of these activist movements within institutions, slapped the term "woke" on to describe this cocktail of values and new evolving norms that are being enforced throughout society by an activist left.

- As a generic catch-all term.

- As a generic catch-all term for some excesses that are very real and that should be critiqued.

With that evolution of the term, those on the left obviously dissociated themselves from the term and disputed that it described what they are in fact doing.

So there's a real dispute between people who say, "Well, wokeness is just being empathetic.

It's just being aware of what's going on."

But that's not what it means anymore.

And so what I try to- - What does it mean now?

- Now I think it actually is a term that cannot be redeemed.

It cannot be dissociated from a lot of bad faith connotations or gaslighting on both sides.

And so what you actually have to reach for is specific language to describe the processes and problems that you're really trying to either promote or critique.

- In the context of the political fight over wokeness, Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis is really at the forefront.

He claims that his state is where woke will go to die.

Does it alarm you that this approach is a model for other Republicans to celebrate and emulate?

- Yes.

And I think that any journalist who interviews Governor DeSantis should simply ask him right away, "Can you please define what woke is?"

I think that, you know, this has become a rallying cry.

Right now, I think it's a very cynical, polarizing tactic.

And I think that what this country needs is a lot less of that, whether you're on the left, right, center or whatever.

- You've often cited the arguments of economist Glenn Loury and specifically his arguments against affirmative action.

Loury appeared on the original "Firing Fine with William F. Buckley, Jr." in 1991, and he made the case that affirmative action cannot rectify historical injustices.

Here he is in 1991 making that argument.

Take a look.

- I think there's very little that a university can do to remedy profound social historic injustices.

Indeed, I think it's a profound truth of our time that there's very little that can be done to remedy some injustices and that one has to recognize that.

That's not to say that one shouldn't be concerned about justice.

It's to say that one should have one's eyes fixed on what it is that one can best do.

Now I'm concerned, for example, about the consequences of historic injustice against blacks so reducing the numbers of young people who have had the opportunity to get the education that would allow them to perform in our universities.

And my answer to that is not to lower the standards of our universities, but it's rather to address myself to the impediments of family, community, primary education, et cetera, that make it so difficult for those young people to put themselves in a position where they can take advantage of these things.

- The Supreme Court is considering a case that could end affirmative action.

And their ruling is expected to come down by the end of this court's term, probably this summer, early this summer.

You've argued affirmative action leads blacks to be held to lower standards and reinforces prejudices.

Is eliminating race-based preferences a step towards the kind of society you talk about in your book?

- It's a complicated question.

It's also very difficult to follow Glenn.

[chuckles] - Glenn Loury?

You're doing fine.

- I've told him many times that he speaks in full paragraphs.

[chuckles] He's an amazing intellect, and I consider him a friend.

Glenn makes a point that I can't get out of my head, which is that you cannot have equality so long as you have separate standards for people in perpetuity.

I think there was a time when you had to have separate standards to even the playing field to a degree.

And I don't know when that time will be over, but if you make the argument that it has to be permanent, then you're saying that actually these groups of people are not and will never be equal.

That's not something that I would ever be able to embrace for myself.

- The question, really, it seems to me, is when?

When is the right time?

I mean, if you consider Jim Crow was in place for 100 years before the Civil Rights Act, maybe 50 years isn't enough.

- Yeah, I mean, Sandra Day O'Connor said, you know, in the early 2000s that, you know, you can imagine in 25 years not needing it anymore.

Well, we're almost at the point she imagined now.

And a lot of people would disagree that we've reached the point where we can do away with it.

I think we have reached a new crisis point, though.

Because something that is happening that is impossible to ignore is that a lot of people who fall under the identity category Asian American are not actually getting a fair shake as individuals.

And that's not something that anybody concerned with justice can simply say is unimportant.

That's an issue we have to figure out how to deal with.

And the kind of way that our affirmative action and our legacy admissions and all of these other ways of getting into college are set up, is that the buck stops with somebody.

And it stops with Asian Americans all too often in ways that are fundamentally unfair.

- Yeah.

You're working on a new book titled "Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness."

It's nearly three years later.

How has Western consciousness shifted since that summer?

- [chuckles] That's the question I'm trying to figure out.

- Give us a preview.

You can come back, too.

- Well, I think, you know, something happened in 2020.

I think there are certain hinge points in our history.

You know, there are moments, there are seasons after which you can say there was a before and an after.

Summer of 2020 was one of those moments.

But now we have to talk about this severe reactionary backlash that has been engendered by that moment, too.

And so the story has to be an understanding of how nothing was the same also because of this massive backlash.

- Final question.

Are you hopeful that America can get to a healthier place on race than we currently are?

- Oh, I am.

You know, James Baldwin said, you know, "I'm a black American, I have no choice but to be an optimist."

And I really take that seriously.

I mean, I live in a different country than my father grew up in.

The difference between generations is enormous.

I have no doubt that we're going to continue progressing.

I do not think the future of America is the kind of movement that Donald Trump brought forth.

I think it really is that movement that got me excited and out in the streets of Baltimore, trying to canvas door to door.

I think we are moving towards that better multiethnic society that we glimpsed and then we took a detour from.

But that's where we're going.

I have no doubt about that.

- Thomas Chatterton Williams, thank you for joining me.

- Thanks for having me.

- [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Charles R. Schwab, The Fairweather Foundation, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, the Asness Family Foundation, Jeffrey and Lisa Bewkes, Peter and Mary Kalikow, and by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Damon Button, the Center for the Study of the International Economy Inc, the Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library, and The Marc Haas Foundation.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. [uplifting music] [uplifting music continues] [uplifting music continues] [gentle chiming music] [heartfelt music] - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.