Can We Transcend Race While Fighting Racism?
Aspen Ideas | Thomas Chatterton Williams
In this Q&A, FAIR Advisor Chatterton Williams argues for moving beyond race in favor of seeing one another as individuals first and foremost. “I want to live in a world where we accept that a person’s physical characteristics and ostensible color category cannot adequately tell us how they will think or act… I want to continue to recognize and oppose the injustice of racism while simultaneously advocating for and modeling an America in which my children never fall for the lie of race in the first place.”
On the birth of his child, a “mixed” child with blond hair and blue eyes, “That’s when I started to understand that the world I was hoping for, one in which the hierarchical, color-coded language of the plantation was truly relegated to the past, would have to be one that we participated in creating. That was the exact moment my passively received understanding of race began to fall apart…”
“We are still living with the repercussions of that exploitation [chattel slavery] and subsequent ones, but that does not mean the categories it imposed on us are real or worth preserving one moment longer. And I don’t think you can oppose one without opposing the other. Which is why I don’t think you can be fully anti-racist while buying into or reproducing the habits of thought racism has created and that in turn give it power…”
“I think a world in which we have transcended race would be one in which we fundamentally learn to interact with other people, and think of ourselves, first and foremost as individuals….Too often the ‘anti-racists’ … start from the same limiting premises—that the racial category is impossible to transcend and therefore real….In so doing they actually end up reproducing the very same flawed and dehumanizing ideas they wish to counteract…”
“There is no such thing as ‘black’ consciousness. Just as there is no singular ‘French’ consciousness or ‘Jewish’ consciousness or any other essentialized way to be for any abstract identity category that exists. There are ancestries, loyalties, cultural practices and traditions, and specific histories taking place in certain geographical regions that we can all value and prioritize to varying degrees.”
