Self-Portrait in Black and White by Thomas Chatterton Williams

Author:Thomas Chatterton Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

TODAY, AFTER EIGHT YEARS of marriage, my path to Valentine seems obvious and irrefutable to me as an individual who has distanced himself from collectives and ideologies of all kinds and made choices as desires and opportunities presented themselves. Yet, none of our lives can ever play out in total isolation. What do we owe each other—not only those we’re close to but complete strangers, too? Can “black” women, or for that matter “Asian” men—both of whom are, in contrast to the opposite sexes of their groups, statistically far less able to find partners of any race—meaningfully renounce their racial identity?† A part of me does, from time to time, still hear that indefatigable bully Cleaver: Why does it so often turn out that, when black men have the option to do it, we so disproportionately marry outside of the “race”? To this question, I have fewer answers than yet other questions still. Is it worth wondering what it even means to marry out of the “race” in a country where, on average, “black” Americans have approximately 25 percent European ancestry and are by definition an ethnically and even psychologically ambiguous, which is to say “mixed,” population to begin with? And are we more or less likely to solve these problems through increased intermarriage and exposure to difference?

The truth is that upwardly mobile black men “marry out” so often it has become commonplace for scholars to describe black women—nearly seven out of ten of whom, like all of my black exes of all education and class levels, were unwed in 2010 when I got married and those figures were compiled—as facing a veritable “marriage crisis.”‡ Even I’m amazed on a purely observational level by the sheer frequency with which successful and often outspokenly race-conscious black men join themselves to non-black women. A few years ago, I attended a dinner thrown by the poet and novelist Ishmael Reed at the home of the tenor saxophonist David Murray. I hadn’t previously known either of these men, but Reed was passing through Paris on his way to a book festival in the countryside, and he sent me an invitation along with a note on Facebook after having read an article I’d published. Less of a household name than Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, within the black community Reed is nonetheless one of the most esteemed living writers. I was deeply honored that he wrote me. I told Valentine about him and that I’d need the following Saturday evening. “Great!” she said. “Should we take a sitter so I can come with you?” I must have let the question hang too long or looked at her bizarrely. As I began to respond, “Sure, but you might be bored . . .” she blushed and laughed. “You don’t want to bring me to meet your big important black writer, do you?”

The piece of mine that had caught Reed’s eye was a lament about the toll in the age of camera phones and social media that

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