Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

This event occurred on:  As the son of an African American father and a white mother, Williams followed conventional assumptions and thought of himself as Black. But after he married a French woman and fathered two blond, blue-eyed daughters, he has come to question the whole notion of “race.” Building on his provocative New York Times op-ed about the “one drop” rule of racial identity, Williams, a 2019 New America Fellow and the author of Losing My Cool, uses his family’s multigenerational transition from “black” to “white” to expose the illogic of racial categories of identity and how reliance on such categories can keep furthering that illogic.