Kapitel 4
Race Beyond America: The Fluidity of Identity
Living in France revealed how race operates differently outside America. In kebab shops, Algerians addressed Williams in Arabic, confused by his inability to speak "my language." When he explained he was Black American, one man protested, "But you are not black. Michael Jordan is black!"
Similarly, white Americans abroad often failed to recognize racial gradations. During a study-abroad trip to Paris, a white American tourist made racist jokes in Williams' presence, later apologizing by saying he'd assumed Williams was "Mediterranean."
This failure to be seen as he would be at home was precisely what attracted many Black American expatriates to France. Unlike African and Caribbean blacks, they were understood first as American, not as black. This revealed race as something fluid and imposed rather than intrinsic-"an afterimage," in Paul Gilroy's words, conditioned not just by who we are but crucially by where we are. Outside America, Williams was coming to the startling realization that our identities are fundamentally malleable.
In 2008, at twenty-six and still in graduate school at NYU, Williams received a life-changing advance for his first book. This sudden freedom coincided with the end of his relationship with Betrys and created an opportunity for reinvention. He spent autumn in Paris, borrowing a friend's studio in the eighteenth arrondissement. Paris offered liberation from American racial categorization. Unlike in Brooklyn where writers nervously compared agents and bylines, Paris treated him as simply a writer. This "existential tabula rasa" permanently affected him, as every cultural encounter became potentially transformative without the weight of racial expectation.
His expanding sense of self coincided with Obama's presidential campaign, which initially filled him with unprecedented idealism. Like many in his circle, he genuinely believed Obama represented not just political change but racial enlightenment. However, while canvassing in Baltimore's impoverished neighborhoods, Williams realized that despite his mixed-race identity, he shared little with the residents of these Baltimore streets. Race overlapped with class and social capital in ways that made him, effectively, a "gringo" on those porch steps, despite his African ancestry.
Kapitel 5
Love Across Boundaries: Marriage and Family
Williams met his future wife Valentine in a bar near Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad in Paris when he was twenty-eight. She arrived with a mutual friend, and something in her bearing-her insouciant pout and mane of yellow curls flowing over an old fur coat-triggered a powerful response in him. Their connection deepened as they discovered shared values-a need to travel and belief in the power of words and ideas, both leading them to sacrifice comfort to earn their living through reading and writing.
The morning after his spontaneous rooftop proposal, alongside exhilaration came terror. Having chosen a white woman felt anything but trivial. Williams thought of Eldridge Cleaver condemning James Baldwin for the "racial death-wish" that motivates blacks to commingle with whites. Was he exhibiting the same "self-hatred" Cleaver described? He remembered his father's aunt's injunction to "never bring home a girl darker than you"-a rule he'd always promised himself he'd disobey.
When they announced their engagement to Williams' parents, their reactions surprised him. His mother's tears revealed her intuition that this union would place an ocean between them-not because of race but because two freelance writers would naturally gravitate to more affordable living conditions in France. His father's unqualified happiness revealed his blues-like stoicism about race-holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously: race isn't real, yet race had harmed him severely. He saw in their union a kind of freedom he'd always valued above all else.
Eight years into marriage, Williams still occasionally hears Cleaver's question: why do successful Black men so disproportionately marry outside their race? The statistics are stark-nearly seven of ten Black women were unwed in 2010 when he married, facing what scholars call a "marriage crisis." Williams is continually struck by how frequently successful, even race-conscious Black men partner with non-Black women.
This reality hit home when he met the esteemed Black writer Ishmael Reed in Paris. When Valentine asked if she should accompany him, Williams hesitated, irrationally worried about disappointing this pro-Black literary figure. Yet when he arrived at the dinner, he found Reed's wife was white, as was the saxophonist host's wife, and another Black expat writer's wife.
Kapitel 6
The Philosophical Disaster of Race
The problem of racial difference isn't merely economic, political, or cultural-it's a philosophical and imaginative disaster. We still struggle to conceive of genuine cross-racial bonds. Looking at old family photos of his mother's white family, Williams feels conflicting emotions: anger, pity, and the cold unreality of familial connection. His Bible-thumping grandfather, whose angular features Williams resembles despite his darker skin, seems more stranger than kin.
Only as a father himself can Williams appreciate the exorbitant price his grandfather inflicted on himself by refusing to acknowledge Williams' father. His grandmother Esther visited them for two weeks each year-enough time for Williams to love her profoundly. His grandfather always remained in California with excuses about flying or his bad back. Only in adulthood did Williams realize the profound unimaginativeness of his grandfather's worldview.
When Williams' aunt posted about their ancestor Anton Spath, a German immigrant who built prosperity in Baltimore starting in the 1850s, Williams couldn't help contrasting his story with his paternal lineage. While white Americans proudly trace their immigrant forebears' rise through thrift and tenacity, Williams realizes that while Spath was amassing property as a total foreigner, his father's people-in America for generations-remained enslaved nearby.
Tracing his paternal ancestry is nearly impossible. The Williams name, Welsh in origin and America's third most common surname, offers little direction. The earliest ancestor he can identify is his great-grandfather James "Pump" McLemore, born in 1865-right at the boundary between bondage and liberty. Beyond him lies an abyss of inhumanity from which few names emerge.
Unlike his daughter's traceable French heritage, Williams' Black ancestry loses coherence at such a remove. Yet racial boundaries are more porous today than ever before. When Valentine and Williams told her father of their engagement, Williams' dignity wasn't at stake-unlike in his father's day, society would not reinforce any limited vision of him. Her father's warm response-leaping up to embrace him and celebrating with champagne-stands in stark contrast to his grandfather's unthinking brutality toward his father.
Kapitel 7
Speaking Truth to Power: Confronting Racial Orthodoxy
Several times a year, Williams speaks at universities about his first book, Losing My Cool. Since marrying Valentine and moving to France, especially since Marlow's birth, he finds it increasingly difficult to deliver talks that once felt inextricably linked to his core being. This is partly because he often speaks at historically black colleges where hip-hop culture-which he critiques but no longer participates in-is simply the air students breathe. But it's also because his "black" experience has veered so drastically from their own.
During one session in Florida, a dark-skinned student with meticulously twisted dreadlocks asked why white people "hate us so much." Williams realized this young man, like many blacks across all demographics, had probably never intimately known or loved a white person-or been known or loved by one. Williams told him that while racists certainly exist, most white people don't actively hate black people; rather, they simply don't or cannot think seriously about black people at all. They lack the imagination or will to try.
The summer of 2014 brought viral videos of black men and children dying. For Williams, the refusal to charge Officer Pantaleo in Eric Garner's killing, combined with Tamir Rice's unpunished execution, provided cause for deep reflection. His photographer friend Kris and he launched a Tumblr project collecting oral histories and portraits of black men, aiming to complicate the basic understanding of black male identity in America.
Williams' twenty-year-old white cousin Hope challenged their project on Facebook: "Will you be doing one with white people?" She insisted, "Your skin no longer defines who you are unless you let it." Though they've only met a handful of times, Williams knows Hope has had a harder life than his. She likes his brother and would say she loves him, yet she lacks the mental bandwidth to consider experiences different from her own. Nothing about her life incentivizes her to do so-the greatest obstacle to mutual understanding.
Williams often reflects on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, where Coates describes confronting a white woman who pushed his dawdling son. His reaction was "hot with all of the moment and all of my history." Yet Coates never extends to this woman the possibility that she might be something other than racist-perhaps just a nasty individual who would have pushed any child regardless of race. If our leading public thinker on race understands white people with such inflexibility and lack of generosity, Williams argues, we'll continue talking past each other instead of reaching common truth.
Kapitel 8
Beyond Race: Toward a New Vocabulary
Since the 2016 election, Williams has watched a demagogue provoke racial resentment while well-meaning white friends publicly flagellate themselves for their "whiteness" as if born into original sin. John McWhorter calls this "the flawed new religion" of Anti-racism, where acknowledging White Privilege becomes a "totemic act" akin to acknowledging Christian sinfulness.
Today's dominant liberal discourse-positioning whites as the nation's only genuine actors and minorities as hapless props-has proven counterproductive. As Glenn Loury warns, when race becomes an irreducible political category rather than incorporated into universal claims of justice, it becomes a weapon anyone can use. "I don't know how you live by the identity-politics sword and don't die by it," he cautions, noting that identity politics inevitably creates white identity politics too: "How are there not white interests in a world where there are these other interests?"
To shift this dismal paradigm, Williams argues we need a new vocabulary that moves beyond abstract racial categorization and reflexive tribalism. Merely declaring race a construct isn't enough. As Walter Benn Michaels notes, "Treating race as a social fact amounts to nothing more than acknowledging that we were mistaken to think of it as a biological fact and then insisting that we ought to keep making the mistake."
Contemporary commentators on race, by establishing identity solely in "the body," reinforce the same racist habits of thought they claim to defeat. Black Lives Matter's aims-drawing attention to criminal justice abuses-Williams overwhelmingly shares. Yet its very framing-that some lives are essentially black while others are white-is politically true in a specific sense but philosophically inadequate.
Williams has reached an existential bind similar to secular Jews: generations of struggle aimed for the freedom to choose and create the self with dignity-yet this very autonomy threatens to annihilate the "racial" identity that won it. That's precisely what must occur nationally. Progress requires sloughing off these old skins we've been forced to don.
Kapitel 9
Reimagining Identity: A Future Beyond Racial Categories
When Williams interviewed white nationalist Richard Spencer, he found Spencer believes "race has a biological-physical component that is totally indispensable." Spencer claimed many white people privately sense there's something genetic about race but avoid saying so to escape being labeled racist.
Harvard geneticist David Reich notes that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry correlating to today's racial constructs exist. However, he cautions that "whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong" and that differences among populations are many times smaller than those among individuals.
If race isn't biological, why pretend it is? When Williams asked Adrian Piper whether there's even a "black sensibility," she denied it. Her point echoes Henry Louis Gates Jr.: all human culture is available to all human beings. What is "black culture" then? There are specific traditions, values, and circumstances of specific groups at specific times-but human life remains too surprising for sweeping statements to withstand scrutiny.
Many "black" Americans have made enormous contributions to music and dance, but does that mean dancing well is inherently part of "black" culture? Not so fast-there are "black" people who dance poorly (like Williams himself) and "white" or "Asian" people who dance with extraordinary grace in any style. What matters isn't the activity itself but the meaning certain groups have attached to it over time.
Children don't automatically loathe their bodies or organize the world racially-these impulses must be learned through contact with others. Unlearning them happens the same way, through serious self-reflection. Albert Murray saw the blues not just as music but as "equipment for living"-a stoic philosophy developed by tenacious slaves and their descendants that reconfigures existential terms. Real dignity comes from accepting and playing the hand you're dealt while understanding no one has a perfect hand.
Adrian Piper's family history perfectly illustrates racial categorization's absurdity. Born in 1948 to a line of whites and light-skinned black property owners on her father's side and mixed-race Jamaican immigrants on her mother's, Piper's father received two contradictory birth certificates-first labeled "white," then "octoroon" (one-eighth black). Her paternal grandfather abandoned his family after his second, darker son was born, moving west to start a new "white" family. Her great-uncle lived as a Caucasian man, founding Piper Aircraft Corporation and becoming wealthy enough to endow a Harvard auditorium.
Kapitel 10
A New Vision: Living Beyond Racial Boxes
During a stay in Provence after his son Saul's birth, Williams' rented house welcomed a diverse gathering of family and friends-Blacks of various mixes, Jews, gentiles, Arabs, Asians, French-speakers both colonial and aristocratic, and Americans. What felt exceptional in our tribal world was how normal it all seemed. Williams may never stop noticing our differences, but he's ceased allowing them to determine our interactions.
While pacing the terrace with Saul strapped to his chest, Williams read Camus, who once lived nearby. "Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history," Camus wrote, "but the sun taught me that history was not everything." This wisdom contrasts sharply with today's dominant voices on race, which insist that history is everything-that "the past is not dead, it's not even past."
These voices rightly point to America's foundation on slavery, genocide, and land theft; to European colonialism; to capitalism's exploitation; to white supremacy's persistence. While partially true, this view that we're merely beholden to past deeds is incomplete. History has noble uses-it helps Williams understand why his father inherited less wealth than his mother-but its utility diminishes when it smothers the present's possibilities.
Williams often ponders Theseus's paradox: if a ship's planks are gradually replaced until none of the original remains, is it still the same ship? The answer depends on whether you believe color is inherent or merely perceptual. What he'd tell his children is that we must always celebrate variety and confront our biases. Unlike chickens hypnotized by lines drawn in dirt, we needn't be immobilized by the past.
Over dinner with Adrian Piper in Berlin, Williams realized genuine liberty is something you must take for yourself with conviction. What made him hesitate to abandon his "black" identity was a vague sense of indebtedness to past suffering-a form of guilt. People who came before him, who suffered inexplicable pain and to whom he owed his life, had been labeled "black" and found ways to triumph despite it. He pledged allegiance to that label not because it was accurate but to honor both their pain and triumph.
When Williams showed Piper a photo of his three-year-old daughter Marlow-ivory-skinned with blue eyes and golden curls-he admitted worrying that she might not feel the same guilt. "Why would you want that?" Piper asked simply. "If the pain and guilt isn't there, why introduce it?" The question stunned him. No one he'd spoken to had ever rejected the premise of allegiance to pain so directly.
Williams left that dinner an ex-black man-not because he'd stopped loving what he'd been taught to call "black," or because he wanted his daughter to blend into what he'd been taught to call "white," but because these categories cannot adequately capture either of them, or anyone else. More and more people like his children-people who are more than what they first seem-will populate our future. What might life look like if we all decided to lift ourselves up and walk away?
