3 Takeaways - What Happened When My Daughter Was Born Looking White - And I Wasn’t (#277)

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

In a Paris hospital delivery room, Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer for The Atlantic and author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, held his newborn daughter for the first time. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. And in that instant, everything he thought he knew about race shattered.Thomas lives the questions about race and identity that most of us only debate. The son of a Black father who grew up under Jim Crow and a white mother, he had accepted America's racial categories without question. Until he couldn't.What he decided is radical. Controversial. And will challenge how you think about identity, George Floyd, and the categories we use to define ourselves.

In a hospital delivery room, a baby is born, blonde hair, blue eyes, and in that instant, a father's idea of race shatters. We talk about race as if it's fixed, something we're born into and can never escape. But what if it isn't? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is three takeaways. On three takeaways I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today I am excited to be with Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of an African American father and a white mother, and now the father of children that most people mistake for white. Few lives capture the complexity of race and

identity the way his does. And he's lived the questions that most of us only debate. He's a writer for the Atlantic and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and Le Monde. He is also the author of two wonderful books, self-portrait in black and white, and his new book, The Summer of Our Discontent. Welcome, Thomas, and thanks so much for joining three takeaways today. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you, Lynn. It is my pleasure, Thomas.

Thomas, you write with extraordinary honesty about your own experience of race. Take us back to that hospital delivery room when the doctor said your daughter had blonde hair and blue eyes, and you saw her. And then you went into the bathroom and wept. What were those tears about? Well, I think that I was fundamentally sleep deprived and crying because the experience of seeing your first child born is so overwhelming that I think you just have a mix of emotions going on. I was relieved that she was there, that she was beautiful, that my wife was okay. But also I had for some time by then been grappling with the sense that something was fundamentally changing in the composition of my family and the lineage of people that I came from

and that I would have to do some uncomfortable and fresh thinking about how we would go about describing ourselves or how I would think of myself, but also the language I would give my children to describe who they are when people ask them and to make sure that they were equipped to understand themselves in the fullest way. I think all of these kinds of different inclinations and premonitions of what the world would confront us with were also confirmed for me. I had been wondering what my child would look like, had sensed that they probably would end up presenting in a way where the world would perceive them as white. But I wanted to have a more complicated understanding of how to speak about that. And that was the beginning of

my sense that what I call the fiction of race was no longer meaningful for us. How did that moment, the birth of your daughter, changed the way you think about race itself? I grew up not very critical of the inherited language and habits of the American way of seeing. I just accepted that I had a white mother and a black father, but I was black because a drop of black blood makes somebody black. And that's the end of the story. Race is binary that I understood had started as a way of keeping some part of the population unfree and another part of the population free, but it had by the time that I was growing up in the 80s and 90s developed into a form of solidarity among black people. Americans are as

physically differentiated from each other as any population can be. So the community runs the gamut of physical characteristics, and that made sense to me the way that I grew up. It wasn't until I had my daughter Marlowe in Paris, where I had been living already for a about three years. And I had already been in the habit of having to explain to people that don't start from exactly the same premises as Americans do who I was. And I would often get a kind of question about, well, why does a drop of blood make a person black? And I'd find myself repeating these arguments that sounded like the logic of the slaveholder. I was making the case of the plantation to people that kind of looked at me with a puzzled expression. And by the time

my daughter was born, I realized that these explanations weren't going to cut it. What does it mean for me to be a black man who can have a daughter who looks like this? What does it mean for her to be a white kid if she has 20% West African DNA, according to 23 and me? I just felt like these categories couldn't really describe us. And then I began to suspect that they can't really describe any of us. We're just all the way on the margins of where these kinds of boundaries bleed into each other, but they don't really fit any of us. So how did the birth of your children change how you see yourself as a man? I decided that I was no longer going to reproduce the logic of slavery and of racial hierarchy and racial difference in my own self-definition.

I can't make my kids or anybody else think about themselves in any way. They will decide for themselves, but I decided that I would no longer be a willing participant in what my late great friend Stanley Crouch called the All-American Skin Game. It seemed to me that these categories we've come for decades now to agree are not fundamentally biologically meaningful. They're socially meaningful, but they're only socially meaningful because we collectively go about reproducing them every day in our language and our habits and our customs of seeing and thinking about ourselves and each other. So I understood that identity is a negotiation between me and the institutions and other people that I interact with.

I'm not able to just call myself anything. But I don't have to actually call myself black, which is a category that had always caused a lot of harm in the life of my father when he grew up under Jim Crow in Texas. And it's caused a lot of harm in the social organization of our society. I don't want to call myself white either. And I don't want to call my children white. I want to opt out of believing that people can be sorted into color categories.

that no one can define the point at which one becomes the other. I just wanted to call myself someone descended from both American slaves and immigrants who came here from Europe freely and somebody who is a part of a community that has certain linguistic traditions, musical traditions that I feel very close to, someone who's proudly the son of a father who grew up among a community of people who had to fight for their civil rights in Texas. I want my children to understand that, but I don't want to reduce that to some kind of abstract color label that any child can see. Human flesh doesn't even legitimize. Nobody is white and nobody is actually black. These are metaphors. After years of writing about race and belonging, what if you come to understand

differently about love for family, for humanity, and maybe even for yourself? I think that we're not going to ever be able to transcend racism. and xenophobia and many of the ills that afflict our societies so long as we continue to accept these ways of dividing ourselves and organizing ourselves into hierarchies based on ancestry and things like this, so long as we believe that we share in the achievements of people who had somehow looked like us in the past or we share in the kind of diminishments of people who had looked like us in the past as opposed to believing that we are here in the present now and what we have as each other.

And so I really think of myself as an individual. I really believe that. And I think of the people that I interact with as individuals. And I don't mean to say that community isn't important or that some people just don't have as high a threshold as I do for giving up on tribes. But I do think that we should really strive to live in ways in which we interact with people with as little of the kind of inherited prejudices and biases of conflicts past as possible. that veil of abstract identity that slips between you and the other that you're meeting, I think, is really the enemy.

I want skin color to convey as much information to me about who you are as hair color does, as eye color does. It's no more physically meaningful as the pigment in your hair or your iris, but we put so much emphasis on the epidermis. What gives you hope right now as you think about identity? That's a good question because I don't think that this is a hopeful time. I really thought, even after the first Trump term, I thought we were on a pretty positive trajectory. I think that I'm 44 and I believe that negative progress, regress, is a real possibility. Things don't always improve. It's incumbent on all of us to actually make the society that we want to achieve the multi-ethnic

society and we can't just assume that it will happen for us. So I think what gives me hope is the idea that a lot of people understand that something is deeply flawed in the way that we are collectively participating in American life. I think that a lot of people are fundamentally good and want something more. And we need to locate and recruit the type of leaders that will allow us to achieve the multi-ethnic society. I really do believe we are capable of. Thomas, if Americans were mainly motivated by race and gender, then Kamala Harris would have earned more black votes and more female votes than Joe Biden, but she didn't. Does that mean America is beginning to move beyond identity politics? I think America is moving beyond the overly

simplistic sense of identity politics that we've believed we're so, or been told we're so important. It shows that people have complex identities, that there's an enormous amount of attention that needs to be paid to class and to educational gaps in differences. and that we don't simply think through the epidermis on both sides. You know, there were a lot of white Americans who were willing to be in opposition to whatever they were told was their ethnic interest and vote against Donald Trump, just as there were blacks and Latinos. So I think that we're hopefully past peak identity balkanization, and we'll have to actually

roll up our sleeves and deal with some issues that transcend abstract color categories. There are multiple ways to see George Floyd. What are those different ways and what do they reveal about America today? I think that the fundamental way to see George Floyd is a poor man, a disenfranchised man, you know, a disadvantaged man. He was a man without any social standing, you could say. He seemed to have really been a part of the American subaltern. He was addicted to drugs. He was in and out of prison.

He was a troubled man. I don't think that that is necessarily reducible to racial. identity. But of course, you know, we have to be able to talk about how race and class overlap in American society. It would be simplistic to say that race is not classed and class is not raced. How do you see what happened after George Floyd's murder? I think that we, the country collectively engaged in a kind of moral panic. I think that, you know, we were in a very unusual moment. There were a confluence of factors that came together. It was the pandemic. We were sheltering in place, many of us, feeling extremely insecure about a developing epidemiological

situation that we didn't fully understand. We were all kind of glued to our smartphones and social media and watching a truly horrific recording of a man slowly be asphyxiated on the pavement as bystanders asked the officer to relent before it was too late. And above all of this, we had the kind of specter of Donald Trump running for re-election, and we had the sense that our democracy itself was on the line. And so there was this kind of moment in which this death, the spectacle of this death, caught our attention and gave a kind of permission structure to go out into the streets and to demand political change by force if necessary, that it was a state of emergency

and the kind of compromising negotiation of persuasion and of politics, as usually, no longer applied. So this summer, I think, was a moment in which people on the left, starting with a very understandable sense of outrage, then greatly overplayed their hand and created, let's say they set the table for a reactionary backlash much worse than what preceded it that we're now living through and that shows no sign of abating. The summer of 2020 granted a permission structure to riot in the streets. I think that this was something that had very important and lasting impacts because of the way that the media tended to want, the mainstream media tended to want to portray it or to say that it wasn't really happening. One of the most important moments of this

summer, I think, in retrospect, was not Minneapolis, but Kenosha, Wisconsin, where you had this viral moment on CNN where a reporter is standing in front of a blazing building, a raging fire, and saying that he's reporting on fiery but mostly peaceful protests after a man named Jacob Blake had been shot and there was enormous damage done and rioting and looting. We were told by the media that this really wasn't that big of a deal, nothing to see here that people were simply demanding justice, but people could see with their own eyes that there was enormous amounts of disorder, that people were not telling them what was really happening.

That was, I think, compounded by the lack of... trust and the hemorrhaging of authority and institutions that had preceded it for several months during the pandemic with messaging around the threat of COVID-19. So I think that there are many things going on at this moment. There was a kind of moral panic that led to some very bad messaging and some very bad editorial decisions at media institutions that I don't think we've recovered from, this lack of trust and authority. Thomas, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today?

One takeaway I always hope that people leave with is to really treat people as individuals and to try as best you can to avoid the pressure to stereotype or to see one another through the kind of prejudices that we've inherited. The second takeaway is to try to get out of your backyard and to meet other people who see the world differently than you and to try to really understand what it is that makes them perceive reality differently and to interact with them through the possibility that they might actually have something to teach you and not that you are there only to dispense wisdom from your experience and that your experience is the only valid one.

And the third is that it's important to be introspective and to be self-critical. I don't think that a kind of ideological purity is a winning message or a winning way of moving through this highly complicated dynamic and surprising society that we inhabit. Thomas, thank you for our conversation today. I learned so much from our conversation and from your books, self-portrait in black and white and the summer of our discontent. It was great talking with you. Thank you.

If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at three takeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.