Black No More?

by Cinque Henderson, Los Angeles Review of Books

LAST NOVEMBER, Thomas Chatterton Williams appeared on a podcast with four other black intellectuals who had gathered to discuss the state of race relations in America. Together, the men, who included Brown University economist Glenn Loury and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter, comprised an “all-star” team of what in our crude political nomenclature might be called black conservatives, though at least one of them confessed to voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. They were not there to discuss the nature of affirmative action or racial inequality, but rather to discuss how those types of things get discussed: an hour-and-a-half-long discourse on racial discourse in the United States called “On Anti-Racism.” They seemed to agree on many things, especially the failures of #BlackLivesMatter, but their central concern was that that there is no hope of getting past racism in this country as long as commentators on the left keep calling things racist when there are more complicated explanations at play. As a listener, I was not entirely unsympathetic to this view…

Williams’s first book, Losing My Cool, made him famous. It was a memoir of his upbringing as the son of a black Southern father who had married white and how, during the 1990s and the rise of gangsta rap, Williams, who had until that time never been really exposed to black people, fell into “performing blackness” in high school — imitating, to his detriment, the crude images of gangsta rappers he saw on BET. I can attest that the book was an important, if flawed, intervention in the discourse around rap: as a certified public high school teacher, I have seen firsthand the harm that the glorification of hyper-violent and hyper-sexual images of manhood, along with widespread poverty and fatherlessness, has had on student behavior and achievement. But Williams, who went to Georgetown for undergrad, eventually pulled away from the poor social influences of his friends and began to live up to the vision of adult black intellectual manhood that his father had envisioned for him his entire life…

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