The Book Club: is race a fiction?

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2020

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s podcast, 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.

The Book Club, what used to be known as Spectator Books, is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

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.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.7	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:23.1	I'm Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to say I have two guests.
0:27.8	We're going to be talking about race, racism and racial identity.
0:32.3	And my first guest is Thomas Chatterton Williams, the American writer whose new book is called Self-Portrait in Black and White Unlearning Race,
0:41.1	and also by the broadcaster and scientist Adam Rutherford, whose new book's called How to Ague with a Racist.
0:47.5	We don't normally do How to books, but we're making an exception here.
0:50.8	Thomas, if I can start with you, the beginning of your book describes a kind of complete
0:56.8	identity you turn in some sense. You spent most of your childhood and young manhood very invested
1:02.9	in the idea of being black. And what changed? Sure. Well, thank you for having me on, first of all.
1:10.5	I grew up in the 80s and 90s in
1:12.3	New Jersey. My father is a black man from the segregated south from Texas, and he's really old
1:18.9	enough to be my grandfather. So he came up in the 30s, 40s, and 50s before civil rights. He's a
1:24.2	sociologist by training. My mother is white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, also sociologist by training.
1:31.0	And I grew up in a household where the idea that a drop of black blood makes you black
1:35.6	was both considered as obviously a fiction, but also very real and salient in our lives.
1:41.8	And my parents raised my brother and I to see our household as a
1:45.0	black household. We lived on the white side of town in a segregated, informally segregated suburban
1:50.8	area. I was, you know, I wasn't treated as though I was mixed. I didn't know people that
1:55.5	define themselves as biracial. I was accepted by the black kids that I knew as black and I wasn't
	...

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