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Self-Portrait in Black and White
- Unlearning Race
- Narrated by: Thomas Chatterton Williams
- Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's summary
A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics.
A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called Black to what is assumed to be White. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a "Black" father from the segregated South and a "White" mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of "Black blood" makes a person Black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he'd never rigorously reflected on its foundations - but the shock of his experience as the Black father of two extremely White-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions.
It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer Black or that his kids are White, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them - or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.
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- Unabridged
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Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.
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A short but compelling combination of history and
- By BK on 05-18-21
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Wandering in Strange Lands
- A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots
- By: Morgan Jerkins
- Narrated by: Morgan Jerkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times best-selling author of This Will Be My Undoing - a writer whom Roxane Gay has hailed as “a force to be reckoned with” - comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her Northern and Southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.
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Not Just Black History -- It's All Of Our History
- By Ardee on 08-22-20
By: Morgan Jerkins
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A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
- By: Alicia Elliott
- Narrated by: Kyla Garcia
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated as a mind spread out on the ground. In this urgent, visceral work, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of the personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas experienced by her so many Native people. Elliott's deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and White communities - a divide reflected in her own family - and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation.
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Well written, heartfelt, revealing
- By KWK on 07-15-24
By: Alicia Elliott
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The Art of Inventing Hope
- Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel
- By: Howard Reich
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The Art of Inventing Hope offers an unprecedented, in-depth conversation between the world's most revered Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, and a son of survivors, Howard Reich. During the last four years of Wiesel's life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago, and Florida - and spoke often on the phone - to discuss the subject that linked them: both Wiesel and Reich's father, Robert Reich, were liberated from Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945. What started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune evolved into a friendship and partnership.
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a view into post holocaust survivors recovery
- By Lance Strosser on 02-17-21
By: Howard Reich
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Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness
- What It Means to Be Black Now
- By: Touré, Michael Eric Dyson
- Narrated by: Touré
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A provocative look at what it means to be Black today. This audiobook includes excerpts from over 100 interviews with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Skip Gates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Mooney, NY Gov. David Paterson, Harold Ford, Jr., Soledad O'Brien, Kamala Harris, Chuck D, Questlove, and others.
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Food for Thought
- By Sara on 12-22-11
By: Touré, and others
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One and Only
- The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One
- By: Lauren Sandler
- Narrated by: Lauren Sandler
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist Lauren Sandler is an only child and the mother of one. After investigating what only children are really like and whether stopping at one child is an answer to reconciling motherhood and modernity, she learned a lot about herself - and a lot about our culture's assumptions. In this heartfelt work, Sandler legitimizes a discussion about the larger societal costs of having more than one.
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Data Driven
- By Meghan B on 01-11-22
By: Lauren Sandler
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Patriarchy Blues
- Reflections on Manhood
- By: Frederick Joseph
- Narrated by: Preston Butler III, Novell Jordan
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In this thought-provoking collection of essays, poems, and short reflections, Frederick Joseph contemplates these questions and more as he explores issues of masculinity and patriarchy from both a personal and cultural standpoint. From fatherhood, and “manning up” to abuse and therapy, he fearlessly and thoughtfully tackles the complex realities of men’s lives today and their significance for society, lending his insights as a Black man.
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Great read!
- By BlissfullyT on 11-15-23
By: Frederick Joseph
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The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Between the World and Me
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
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A Heartfelt Self-aware Literary Masterpiece
- By T Spencer on 07-30-15
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Racecraft
- The Soul of Inequality in American Life
- By: Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.
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A loose collection of essays
- By Texas Mama on 11-18-21
By: Karen E. Fields, and others
What listeners say about Self-Portrait in Black and White
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ian Clements
- 10-15-24
his perspective on racial identity
it was a very good read and informative to those who want to learn a different perspective on racial identity
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- Bryan Todd
- 12-14-22
A beautiful, challenging meditation
Beautifully written. He compels you to stop and look twice and reconsider your basic assumptions. I plan to read more of his work.
Not the greatest reading of the material. He sounds stilted and sometimes even bored. But it is his own material and the content is terrific.
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- Matthew Nielsen
- 11-30-19
Clear thinking as counterculture
Williams is a gifted thinker and writer, which makes his attention to this topic a real and important contribution. His background in philosophy lends itself well to the discussion and his familiarity with Ellison, Crouch, and Baldwin are noticeable at certain points in the book.
Sadly, these great writers are largely ignored in America where individualism is drowned out by hollow intersectionality and its illogical companion, collectivism.
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4 people found this helpful
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- MaxD
- 01-31-20
Insightful and honest introspection
Thomas Chatterton Williams “Self-Portrait” is a book full of insightful question about race and our relationship to it. The book mainly struggles with the conundrum of how poor race is a category for defining or even understanding people. Biologically race doesn’t make much sense in the human context. Evolutionarily, population, race, species, sub-species etc are, over times both long and short, transient and ever shifting. Words like sub-species, and race don’t even make sense in the context of the human ape, Homo sapiens. This isn’t to say that for some groups certain sets of genes might clump one statistically probable clouds for short periods of time, nor that those clouds, better thought of as gene pools, might not, when well understood, help people understand the history of their ancestors or even grant insight into health. When looked at that way the language of color this person is black, that person is white implodes and the social construction of race reveals itself.
Williams grapples with this, not in the scientific language of the population ecologist, or the geneticist but as a logician and philosopher. He does cite a few biologists and work on the genetics of human difference (which is more superficial than most people realize) to ground his conclusion. But his use of reason, logic and the moves of serious philosophy are sufficient in many ways to doom the idea of race.
There is more here than that of course and I’ll let Williams speak for himself and not further synopsis the book. It’s worth your time even if you don’t find yourself in agreement. Williams is a gifted writer, and a challenging thinker. This is always a good thing.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Wayne
- 06-18-20
Honest self-portrait of identity
Thomas Chatterton Williams presents a strong case that use of racial designations in identity description is meaningless. Stated differently he believes that there is only one race of humans, the human race. And that further racial identifications is not only meaningless but also destructive. He is joined in this opinion by such "Black" intellectuals as John McWhorter, Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Winfred Reilly, and Glenn Loury among others.
SELF-PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE - UNLEARNING RACE is an intensely personal description of key portions of Williams' life that led him to his conclusions about race.
As Juneteenth 2020 approaches and we consider the violent death of George Floyd at the hands/knees of Minneapolis police officers it is a time for citizens to reflect on matters of race in the US, it seems odd to me that Audible buys 100% into the religion of antiracism to the point of not recommending this book while recommending others that take the opposite view.
One of the most interesting aspects of Williams' book is his description of sending a DNA sample to 23andME for evaluation. That is something that I have also done. I learned that over 3% of my DNA is from West Africa while the most of the rest is northern European. The fact is that few of us are of one "race"; we are almost all mixtures. The average "Black" in the US is 27% white. Most people would classify me as "white" but under the "one drop rule" at 1/32nd "Black" I qualify as "Black". Author of this book Thomas Chatterton Williams has two children both of whom are blue-eyed blondes.
Human racial designations are meaningless!
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16 people found this helpful
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- Michael Bennett
- 12-28-19
Important work
On a long ride and just finished the best book on race that I’ve read in 25 years. This is the most important voice on the issue of race in America in this generation. In contrast to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ observations, anecdotes and anger Chatterton Williams has a reasoned, optimistic solution based vision for how we shed race and truly move forward.
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4 people found this helpful
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- DennyB
- 05-05-21
Thought provoking, and wise.
This book made me think. Unlike so many current titles, this book was full of wisdom and carefully thought out conclusions. The aim was to find common ground and workable solutions, not enrage and create division. Hearing the words read by the author was an added bonus. His soothing tone relayed the importance he seems to place on careful consideration of social patterns and personal responsibility.
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- Anthony Baptiste
- 07-18-20
Hopeful future
My experiences though not the same are very similar and this has opened me to more of this line of thing
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- Matt
- 05-31-21
Diving In
For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach race or see what the future may hold with the way many people approach race today. It’s obvious that there is a problem and as a white guy I feel that it is difficult to help. I’ve been searching for a place to begin. I’ve been listening to Coleman Hughes and his thoughts and then I stumbled across this. And This was another answer I was looking for. But this isn’t the whole picture, more of a jumping off point. I generally don’t enjoy contemporary stories that are biographical in nature but this one was interesting and engaging, with lessons throughout. Also, the philosophy of Camus was an interesting approach which was enjoyable. Definitely worth the read, especially the end.
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- Anonymous User
- 10-18-22
didn't expect much
I'm happy my class assigned this book it has become my favorite of the year!!
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