Memoirist and The Atlantic staff writer Thomas Chatterton Williams will give the morning lecture at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, discussing the current American conversation about race and the constructed perception of race in U.S. culture. He opens a week for the Chautauqua Lecture Series themed “Our Greatest Challenges (That We Can Actually Do Something About.)”
Currently based in Paris, Chatterton Williams brings insight from both a French and American perspective about his experiences navigating racism, which he discusses at length in his memoir, titled Self-Portrait in Black and White.
Self-Portrait in Black and White tells the author’s experiences raising his daughter, which pushed him to consider his own perception and understanding of the socially-constructed U.S. idea of race.
In his memoir, Chatterton Williams makes a case for retiring race-based language. Instead, he opts to identify himself more specifically. In a 2019 interview with The Guardian, he said he tries “to find more specific ways of identifying myself. So I would say I’m American. I’m descended from southern slaves, and I’m descended on my mother’s side from northern European Protestant immigrants. I don’t mean that I’m a white man.”
Chatterton Williams posited in the interview that this is an inherently optimistic approach, because it allows people to be more fully and authentically themselves.
He said in the interview that anybody who has been affected by the concept of race in the United States should be engaging in dialogues about the ideas presented in his book.
“Who I want to be talking about this with is anybody whose race has been made in America, which is all people,” he told The Guardian.
In addition to that memoir, Chatterton Williams is also the author of Losing My Cool, a memoir in which he reflects on his love of family, literature and hip-hop culture and how he strived to balance the three interests. His forthcoming book, Nothing Was the Same, will be published by Knopf.
Additionally, Chatterton Williams is a current visiting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. He is also a 2022 Guggenheim fellow and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.
Previously, Chatterton Williams was a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper’s Magazine. He has published work in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books and Le Monde, in addition to others.
