The Book Club: Adam Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams: talking about race

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2020

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s podcast, we're replaying an episode that first aired earlier this year, but seems more relevant now than ever. Sam is joined by two writers to talk about the perennially fraught issue of race. There’s a wide consensus that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong; but what actually *is* race? Does it map onto a meaningful genetic or scientific taxonomy? Does it map onto a lived reality - is it possible to generalise, say, about 'black' experience? And can we or should we opt out of or ignore it? Adam Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams approach these issues from very different angles: the former, in How To Argue With A Racist, brings genetic science to bear on the myths and realities of population differences; while the latter describes in Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race how after half a lifetime strongly attached to the idea of his own blackness, the arrival of his blonde haired and blue eyed daughter made him rethink his worldview.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:05.0	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12 as well as a £20,000, Amazon voucher.
0:10.0	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:15.0	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:19.0	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator. and this week we have an episode for you which we first aired last year, but that seems as relevant, if not more, in today's cultural climate.
0:29.8	I'm talking about race.
0:33.3	My first guest is Thomas Chatterton Williams, the American writer whose new book is called Self-Portrait in Black and White Unlearning Race, and also by the broadcaster and scientist Adam Rutherford, whose new book's called How to Ague with a Racist.
0:48.7	We don't normally do How to books, but we're making an exception here.
0:52.0	Thomas, if I can start with you, the beginning of your book
0:55.9	describes a kind of complete identity you turn in some sense. You spent most of your childhood
1:02.2	and young manhood very invested in the idea of being black. And what changed? Sure. Well, thank you
1:09.7	for having me on, first of all.
1:11.6	I grew up in the 80s and 90s in New Jersey.
1:14.6	My father is a black man from the segregated south from Texas, and he's really old enough to be my grandfather.
1:21.6	So he came up in the 30s, 40s, and 50s before civil rights.
1:24.6	He's a sociologist by training.
1:26.6	My mother is white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant,
1:29.9	also sociologists by training. And I grew up in a household where the idea that a drop of
1:35.6	black blood makes you black was both considered as obviously a fiction, but also very real and
1:41.9	salient in our lives. And my parents raised my brother and I to see our
1:45.7	household as a black household. We lived on the white side of town in a segregated, informally segregated
1:51.6	suburban area. I was, you know, I wasn't treated as though I was mixed. I didn't know people
	...

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