Thomas Chatterton Williams authored the book Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.. He holds that "Racism and race are two separate things," meaning that racism is the father of race, and not the other way around. What that means is that there are no distinct races within the species homo sapiens."
Here is an excerpt of an interview Chatterton-Williams gave, published at Aspen Ideas:
Q: "What does a world in which we have transcended race look like? What promise does it hold for people whose racial identity creates a sense of belonging that would be hard to want to let go of?"
A: [Thomas Chatterton Williams]: "I think a world in which we have transcended race would be one in which we fundamentally learn to interact with other people, and think of ourselves, first and foremost as individuals. We live in extraordinarily mixed societies already. I want to live in a world where we accept that a person’s physical characteristics and ostensible color category cannot adequately tell us how they will think or act, what kind of character they possess, or to which class they belong. Many of us profess to believe this already, but we don’t really behave like we do. And part of not behaving like we do is not putting too much stock in that sense of belonging based on abstract notions of “race.” I would just caution any non-white people who find it difficult to imagine giving up the solidarity and sense of empowerment they derive from membership in their racial group that this is also how white supremacists feel. Now, most well-meaning people can immediately understand the problem with a sense of meaning and pride based in belonging to a “race” when they think about “white” people professing this. We just need to be consistent now. Too often the “anti-racists” on the left start from the same limiting premises—that the racial category is impossible to transcend and therefore real, if not biologically real then so socially constructed that it amounts to the same thing—that the genuine racists hold to be true. In so doing they actually end up reproducing the very same flawed and dehumanizing ideas they wish to counteract."
I have categorized this article under the category of ""Race" and Racism" a term I use in scare quotes because I don't believe in "race" even though (like Chatterton-Williams) I acknowledge the existence of racism, which is caused by the false belief in "race." I have written several articles on this topic (e.g., here). Most recently, I have been impressed with Thomas Chatterton Williams, Kmele Foster and Sheena Williams, author of the brand new book, Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism).
I have enjoyed watching Jon Stewart over the years and looked forward to this conversation involving Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan. It was not what I expected. It was not a conversation at all. On these issues of race, Stewarts exhibits absolutely no sense of nuance, no curiosity regarding the statistical evidence pertaining to the issues and no interest in tamping down the shrill racist declarations of a second guest, a woman named Lisa Bond. I'd recommend that you watch two videos before reading further. The first is Stewart's introductory "comedy skit" regarding racism. The second involves the "conversation" with Andrew Sullivan.
Jon Stewart’s insistence that Americans had never robustly debated race before 2020 is also, well, deranged. Americans have been loudly debating it for centuries. There was something called a Civil War over it. His claim that white America has never done anything in defense of black Americans (until BLM showed up, of course) requires him to ignore more than 300,000 white men who gave their lives to defeat the slaveholding Confederacy. It requires Stewart to ignore the countless whites (often Jewish) who risked and gave their lives in the Civil Rights Movement. It requires him to erase the greatest president in American history. This glib dismissal of all white Americans throughout history, even those who risked everything to expand equality, is, when you come to think about it, obscene.
Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans. As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.” To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.
Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry. He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”
I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening. His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist. Those fucking white men, Lincoln and LBJ, never gave a shit.
What is stunningly obvious about Stewart's rant (and all Woke rants) is the lack of ideas for how to fix the problems they point to (and many of them are legitimate concerns). It's all theatrical virtue-signaling that refuses look at actually problems and solutions. For instance, what are some real-life changes we could implement that would actually result in inner-city minorities getting better math and reading skills? There is also a consistent refusal by these Woke performers to look at relevant data. Look what happened to Roland Fryer when he looked at real numbers and urged real solutions. Look at what happened to Steven Pinker.
For excellent analysis of Stewart's rant, see the [upcoming for non-subscribers] episode of The Fifth Column podcast "The Problem with Jon Stewart." Analysis begins about minute 23 and runs for an entire hour.
[Added April 3, 2022]
There are many Woke-inspired "conversations" like this and most of them are deficient and misleading in the same way. They talk a lot about average, as though every "black"* person is the average person, when that is wildly false. The "average" encompasses a wide distribution of people, many of whom are quite successful along with those who are struggling. In fact, 60% of "black" people are middle class or above. Why don't they discuss the many successful "black" people? And why don't they ask what the successful "black" people are doing that unsuccessful "black" people are not doing? And why don't they discuss what unsuccessful "black people are doing that unsuccessful "white" people are also doing? Such discussions simply don't help their narrative, which is that every "black" person in modern American is constantly victimized by racism perpetuated by every "white" person.
*I am no longer going to use the terms "white" and "black" to refer to groups of people. The willingness to categorize people by "color" is the first step onto the slippery slope of racism. There is definitely racism in the U.S., but there is no such thing as "race." We can tamp down the former if we stop categorizing people (of any "color") in this crude, baseless and dangerous way. For more on my refusal to categorize people as colors, see this article on Dr. Sheena Mason and see this article holding that "race" has no more validity than astrology. When people ask for my astrological sign, I tell them that the are engaged in a nonsensical thinking. Same thing whenever people categorize each other by color or "race." Mason adheres to a theory of gracelessness, which she backs up with her own theory of gracelessness, which is a methodological and pedagogical interpretive and teaching framework for "how to analyze race and racism across time and place." She discusses her threory at length in the video below, starting at Min 14:
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don't believe in "race" even though (like Chatterton-Williams) I acknowledge the existence of racism, which is caused by the false belief in "race." I have written several articles on this topic (e.g., here). Most recently, I have been impressed with Thomas Chatterton Williams, Kmele Foster and Sheena Williams, author of the brand new book, Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism).