Can we unlearn race? With Thomas Chatterton Williams

De Balie

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Ex-black, that is what the American writer and cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams calls himself provocatively. Chatterton Williams argues that while there is a lot of attention for the fluidity of gender and sexuality, when it comes to race we are still stuck in binary concepts. Should we stop using racial terminology?

Growing up in the United States, son of a black father from the segregated South en and a white mother from California, Thomas Chatterton Williams never questioned his identity: he was black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he never rigorously reflected on its foundations. But his experience of living in France and becoming the father of two white-looking, blonde-haired children led him to question long-held convictions about race and identity. During Vrijdenkersfestival we invite Thomas Chatterton Williams to discuss his quest to unlearn race. Did we bring in the Trojan horse with racial terminology, or is thinking in ‘black’ and ‘white’ the only way to address and fight racism?

"I am convinced that we will never overcome the evils of racism as long as we fail first to imagine and then to conjure a world free of racial categorization and the hierarchies it necessarily implies"

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