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Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a white mother and black father, says on this week’s podcast that he had always “very much bought into — and really believed in — the American racial binary that says a drop of black blood makes a person black.” Williams’s new book, “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race,” was inspired by the birth of his daughter, an event, he says, that “made me rethink the way we box each other into categories. And it made me wonder what it means if I’m a black person that can have a blond-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned daughter. What does blackness mean? What does whiteness mean, if she can be 20 percent sub-Saharan African? I wrote the book because my belief in the racial fiction kind of fell apart in that hospital room.”
Stephen Kinzer visits the podcast this week to discuss his new book, “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for…
