welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. notjust in the united states but across the world, the black lives matter movement has prompted debate about race, identity and power. it is a campaign predicated on ideas about what it means to be black and white. but what if those very terms are themselves pa rt those very terms are themselves part of the problem? my guest one is a mixed—race american writer, a self—declared ex— black man whose ideas presented challenge to so—called woke culture. and how much room is there right now for respectful, thoughtful debate? thomas chatterton williams in paris, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. it is a pleasure to have you on the show and i think thomas we need to begin with a little bit of your personal story. you were born in the united states to a black father and a white mother and i'm just wondering how, as and i'm just wondering how, as a child, now that you have had many, a child, now that you have had any a child, now that you have had many, many years to reflect on it, how did you forge your own sense of identity, coming from a mixed—race family? sense of identity, coming from a mixed-race family? sure. well, you know, race is constructed in different ways in different locations. which is something i didn't know coming up in the 80s and 90s in newjersey. ijust coming up in the 80s and 90s in new jersey. i just knew coming up in the 80s and 90s in newjersey. ijust knew that i was the son of a black man from the segregated south and a white mother from out west in california. and the culture that i grew up in was one in which the logic of what we called the one drop rule prevailed which was essentially if you have any black ancestry at all, then you are black. the white kids i grew up around in newjersey did not think of me as white and the black kids i grew up around as white and the black kids i grew up around were as white and the black kids i grew up around were accustomed to accepting any manner of different skin tones and hair textures under the umbrella of blackness so my sense of self was rather complicated until the age of about 30 when i had moved to paris —— rather uncomplicated. i married a blonde hair, blue—eyed white french who resembled my mother in her physical characteristics, actually, in terms of blonde hair and blue eyes, and i realised if we were to have children, they very mel —— they very well may not physically present as black. thomas i will stop you because this is fascinating and i want to go through piece piece so if i take you back and rewind until you are a kid growing up in newjersey, i believe, you say that you could identify with the black kids around you in the neighbourhood but what you missed out on that story is what your parents actually told you, because you have your black father and white mother. what do they tell you you were, as you were growing up what do they tell you you were, as you were growing up or what do they tell you you were, as you were growing up or what are they sort of encourage you to think? sure. my father is old enough to be my grandfather, he was born in 1937 in longview texas and he grew up fully under segregation, prior to civil rights — from he was a adult before civil rights so he was from an america that i really only know about from reading and from listening to him and other elders. but where he grew up other elders. but where he grew up on the set presented side of town, but if he grew up on the segregated side of town people white who are technically black or believed to be black or believed themselves to be black, my father is a trained sociologist and he and my mother taught me that race is not something that is biologically real. we see physical contradictions all of the time around us. but it is something that is socially construct it and we'll because we make it so as a society. so my mother and my father were pretty clear that my brother andi pretty clear that my brother and i were black men in this world and we needed to understand how to move that way in the world and we also needed to be proud of that. so actually, my mixed family, i had a relatively uncomplicated sense myself as black. yeah. i am interested in that because i know, you for a while were into rap culture and sort of popular black culture and then you decided that that was a very restricting, unsatisfactory —— u nsatisfa ctory restricting, unsatisfactory —— unsatisfactory sort of framework to address your identity and your blackness so you moved on from that but i am very taken with something you wrote as recently as 2012, when you were reflecting on the age of barack obama and the white house and you said "mixed race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black and interracial couples share a —— mixed—race children. there we have, eight years ago, obama in the white house, and you thomas chatterton williams absolutely sure, not only of your own black identity but also that your kids should have also that your kids should have a very clear black identity. yeah, well, you know, there is no physically more diverse group of people than american blacks. they run the gamut from blonde haired blue eyes folks to people who look directly out of western africa. i believe that there was kind of a decision and a choice in a kind of duty to almost defend this identity, that i felt myself coming close to being perceived as having left behind and when i wrote this op—ed in the new york times in 2012, you know, in retrospect i can say that i was attempting to convince a readership of one, i was trying to persuade myself that... interesting. having these children that i was aware were going to most likely look in ways that other people would not perceive as lucky, i was trying to convince myself i was not giving up any so—called authenticity and it wasn't until i was actually living with them not as ideas but as actual flesh and blood with them not as ideas but as actualflesh and blood human beings that i realised i was going to have to have a much more sophisticated and complicated understanding of what it means to be authentic. right, so you clearly did a very bad job, if you don't mind me saying, of convincing yourself because your ideas have evolved not so much around a corner but a complete u—turn. so that when you and your french wife had kids, it seems that changed everything and you decided you won't black at all? it isa decided you won't black at all? it is a little more complicated than that. first of all it is important that mackay had been living in france for several yea rs living in france for several years at this point and it is important to understand the french don't have a concept of the one drop rule, it is not how they perceive identity. many people did not understand why i even identified myself solely as black. they would be more familiar with terms like matisse which is mixed and its own kind of category and they never had slavery but within the bounds of their own societies and there was not this fear of impurity that a drop of black blood was thought to give whites in america the impurity of being enslaved. so all of this was foreign to my wife and i prevailed on her that she was going to be the mother of black children and she was into it but when our daughter was born looking essentially swedish, i realised that it was going to be a head trip to send a child out into this world to identify by the logic of the plantation in the 21st—century. i realised i needed a new vocabulary to understand her but i was not saying that i am no longer black or that she is white, i am saying that the existence of her in my life kind of thrust the fiction of race into my consciousness in a new way and these categories no longer made sense to me, notjust for us but for anyone. maybe i have misunderstood things but i thought had pretty much declared that you were, to coin a phrase i have seen, and x like man, you renounced the notion of you being black —— ex—black. notion of you being black —— ex-black. this is why it is important to say things as clearly as possible. because it is not that i am a ex—black man but i think everybody else is white and black and that these qualities are real. these categories are real. it is that iamat categories are real. it is that i am at ex—black because i don't any longer want to participate in this racial binary that is built on the unequal interaction of europe and africa through the slave trade in the new world. but if i may, sorry to interrupt, this is interesting because what you are trying to do is put all of the agency for the way you relate to the world in your own hands. but surely, the whole point of black lives matter, of all of the debate we see today about race, is race is not something that you can define for yourself, it is the way you are perceived and defined by others. and frankly for you, yes, you live in france but you are still an american man and you have an influential voice now thanks to your writing but you know when you go back home to the united states, you will be perceived still as a black man. you cannot renounce your race, can you, in that way? well, you can make, you can rebel against what you consider to bea rebel against what you consider to be a mistake and unjust orders. a police officer can stop me and consider me black and kill me. and that would be and kill me. and that would be a racialised death if he were to do that. but it doesn't mean i have to accept his definition of reality when i create my own sense of reality. but you can't escape from his, that is the point, you cannot escape from his definition of reality and when you talk about race today, i think it is fair to say a lot of black people in the united states think to themselves here is thomas chatterton williams, he writes for the new york times and the new yorker and atla ntic times and the new yorker and atlantic magazine and all of these influential magazines and he talks interestingly about race but his lived experience is so different from mine that he frankly has no real right to tell me what race means, how we should deal with race in america today because he's in a funny sort of way run away from it and he lives in paris and my lived experience back in the united states tells me that being black is still a very real and meaningful and discriminated against experience. your identity is a co nsta nt experience. your identity is a constant negotiation between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive yourself and how the institutions and other people you interact with perceive you. when i'm in france, i'm frequently misperceived as north african or arab. it doesn't make it real and it doesn't mean i need to a cce pt real and it doesn't mean i need to accept that sense of myself that the french system of reality thrust on me. it does not mean that people who are racialised as black in america need to redefine or reinforce that sense of themselves by embracing the mistaken racial categorisation society thrusts on them and continuing to reproduce it. so i think people have to do two things at once, fight against the racism that actually exist in the world that they encounter and they have to keep their eyes on a future that no longer has a need for these antiquated ways of seeing but are not based on anything scientifically or biologically real in our bodies. so i do not think that is too hard to do. ijust wonder in practical terms, what you are adding to the debate by saying, as you have said in influential articles, but what you want to see is a return to a childlike notion that skin colour and racial origins simply don't matter, that we don't count them, we don't notice them even, because we have not been systematically programmed to think in that way. you talk of that being the ideal you want to work towards but in what way is that anything more than fantasy? well, i don't know what to say other than you have to kind of demand things that seem unreal in the moment in order to make progress. you know, james baldwin, to paraphrase, that something like, you know, anytime you acquiesce to the idea that some people are white and some people are like you are buying into a delusion. and, you know, to escape the delusional thinking is impossible but we owe our children nothing less than the impossible. i mean, the world cannot we cannot simply accept that the world will always believe that black people and white people, so—called black people in so—called white people in so—called white people are of different races. even though we know that there is no such things as different races inside the human family and we cannot buy into that without wishing or hoping for a system of reality that would be actually true and accurately reflect the fact that we are one and the same. crosstalk. the most famous sort of civil rights quite of them all, martin luther king, saying people should bejudged by martin luther king, saying people should be judged by the colour of their skin but the content colour of their skin but the co nte nt of colour of their skin but the content of the character. i mean that in essence is pretty much your message too but the whole point of martin luther king surely was that he wanted a civil rights movement to peaceably demand change and fight forjustice peaceably demand change and fight for justice and your approach seems to be almost to say well, because i do not accept the thought of binary black— white paradigms, i am sort of opting out of the struggle and you clearly have a problem with black lives matter but... paradigm, i am opting out of the struggle and you clearly have a problem with black lives the struggle and you clearly lives matter? i would not say that even. i have a problem with reinforcing ways of thinking that are based on untruths or pseudoscientific relics of conflicts past. what we have to do is figure out how we have to do is figure out how we could make out multi—ethnic societies work. we will not be multi—ethnic societies in america, in france, in many western democracies, how will we make the societies work? will it be by doubling down on reinforcing the mistaken notion that we are separate races and therefore every separate racial category must be somehow equally respected, even though these colour categories necessarily imply higher archetypal arrangements, coming from slavery or is the way we make societies function better is by trying to actually live up is by trying to actually live up to the idea of transcendent humanism, in which people are individuals not avatars of groups, broadly defined, a bstra ctly groups, broadly defined, abstractly coloured ? how groups, broadly defined, abstractly coloured? how do we make that function? black lives matter, you mention, in terms of their desire to not be violated in the streets and shot down by police officers, and police officers in america, they destroy 1000 people or more a year of all physical varieties, of all racial backgrounds, they kill about 500 white people a year in america and they can disproportionately a line of black and native american people in america. as far as they have a goal of trying to eliminate that type of abuse, i'm all for it. as far as they believe that they do make there are black lives inherently different to white lives, then i don't get on board with that rhetoric. this is where it gets sensitive and difficult. not so long ago on the show i interviewed the american philosopher and podcast to sam harris he has a big following across the us and he basically said that he has a profound problem with black lives matter because to him, it was another form of corrosive identity politics. i'm not so sure, pretty much you are saying the same thing, aren't you? but you are saying it as a man who was brought up to be feeling for himself to be a black man in the united states but you are saying this form of politics is corrosive, auntie i'm saying that, for anything that you've seen that is mobilise people ‘s outrage of a black man. even the footage of a black man george floyd being kneeled on until he dies, horrifically, you can find videos or evidence or case histories of that happening to a white person. i'm not saying there is not racism involved or terrible injustice towards certain demographics. i'm saying that what is our goal? if alcohol is to eliminate these kinds of abuses and to de—escalate —— if our goal is to de—escalate militarised police forces, my thinking is the best way to do thatis thinking is the best way to do that is to get a broad—based consensus that brings people together as opposed to make people believe that this is somehow a racialised abuse that only affects one demographic and therefore they can antagonise people as we have seenin antagonise people as we have seen in some of the excessive violence associated with violence associated with violence over the summer have done after initial outpouring of sympathy for the cause. i do not think we will get you a better future by fracturing ourselves into ever more hyper specific identity categories. your memoirs and your journalism and your writing have brought you into conflict with what one may call the progressive, some would say, the woke cultural movement in the woke cultural movement in the united states. how difficult have you found it to engage in debate, to air these ideas that you are airing with me, ina ideas that you are airing with me, in a form which does not degenerate into name—calling? well, twitter is not the best place probably to engage these debates. ifind place probably to engage these debates. i find that publishing longform essays is pretty good. ifind longform essays is pretty good. i find that longform essays is pretty good. ifind that coming longform essays is pretty good. i find that coming on programmes like yours is a good way of speaking about ideas but many people that criticise, some of the people that have the loudest voices on these issues, they are not much into debate. they are much more into a pseudo— religious kind of speech are fine that brooks no dissent. we do not have a debate going on except for one that speaks past each other. so i could have come in for criticism but unfortunately i have never been able to address directly some of the people you may be referring to. other than behind the scenes. the thing is, what you did do in the summer, which is very high you are one of the prime movers in are one of the prime movers in a letter, jointly signed through harper's magazine that was published pretty much 150 many well—known writers, authors, novelists, all sorts of people, including very famous figures like jk of people, including very famous figures likejk rowling, martin amis and others, they all put their names to this kind of condemnation of what you called cancel culture, the idea that there is some sort of new work progressive censorious which is damping down on people like you, about liberals, expressing ideas that do not go with the woke consensus. surely the truth is you have an amazing platform, as do all the other 150 people complaining about cancelled culture, what is this cancel culture you speak of? the first thing is we we re very speak of? the first thing is we were very personal —— purposeful about not using that term, we never say cancel cups are —— cancelled culture that has been coming from people like donald trump and others on the right. we have been urged to publicly shame and most importantly keep from being gainfully employed, people whose views and speech offends some group and this kind of co nsta nt some group and this kind of constant stories nurse comes from both the left and the right but it's true that media and cultural institutions that many of our signatories find themselves in often comes from themselves in often comes from the left. so, i don't think that many of us were arguing for ourselves though but i'm sure i'm not in a position of jk rowling or salman rushdie but most of us all that this letter was a way of speaking on behalf of people whose names will not be on the letter. people who are seeing what happens to jk people who are seeing what happens tojk rowling when she descends from the consensus view or seeing what happens to barry rice or what happened to salman rushdie when he had a fatwa and we can see what has happened to others in iran with fatwa is an people who.... happened to others in iran with fatwa is an people who. . .. hang ona minute, fatwa is an people who. . .. hang on a minute, you cannot throw in these reference to fatwa, the most famous which was again salman rushdie because if you do that you are making an equivalence between islamists, fundamentalists, opposing everything that they see as a transgression of their religious ideology, and people on the left is simply think that certain things said about transgender —ism or a whole host of other issues should not be given a platform. are you saying there is an equivalence with the islamist fundamentalists? no, i'm not saying there is an equivalence but i'm saying that many people from garry kasparov or some you have fatwas or to some who escaped authoritarian regimes in iran and elsewhere, to dwayne betts, the party spent eight years in a maximum security prison since the age of 16 security prison since the age of16 and security prison since the age of 16 and then graduated from yale law school afterwards, many of these people who have been through serious forms of silencing believe it operates on the continuum. there was a counter on the continuum. there was a cou nter letter after on the continuum. there was a counter letter after your side bya counter letter after your side by a whole bunch of other writers, jeff yang was one of them, he worked for wall street journal, he said it is hard not to see your letter as merely an elegantly written letter affirmation of elitism and privileged by people have absolutely no problem expressing views. he has a point, hasn't he? i don't think so. first of all, my inbox is flooded with messages from people who would not be considered elites, who may be assistant book editors and associate professors without colleges who say that the letter really was a shot in the arm or maybe even allowed them to feel that they may possibly be able to express themselves and people have written to us to say they have never once said what they're actually think in the context of a work environment because they say they don't believe they could survive that. so, i think that this letter was about half of them and that's not a very elite project. some of the people in the letter are extraordinarily elite, there's no denying that but what i see them having done is an of generosity. they don't have to signa generosity. they don't have to sign a letter or do anything else. they don't have to work anymore. so him speaking up is not for himself, it's for anyone who could be benefited by his voice. thomas chatterton williams, we have run out of time. thank you so much for joining me on hardtalk. it is a pleasure. thank you. hello. the current spell of settled weather is expected to continue for a few more days yet and friday promises to be another beautiful day across the uk. for some of us, clear blue skies, may be hazy at times, but on the whole, a fine day. so, high—pressure is in charge of the weather, notjust on friday but through much of the weekend. the south of the country is a little bit closer to the low pressure that may bring a few showers on the weekend. but the short term is certainly looking dry. across most of the uk, friday morning, sunshine pretty much from the word go. a little nippy first thing in the north of england, getting in as low as five degrees early in the morning. so, here is the forecast for friday afternoon. lots of sunshine, that breeze is quite strong, despite the breeze still 22 degrees in london, 19 in the midlands, 21 degrees in glasgow and edinburgh, and on those winds, gusts possibly up to 40 miles an hour in the south coast of england. that will take the edge off the temperatures. a bit of a bluster there if you're walking along the channel coast. the evening is promising to be fine across most of the uk. here's saturday's weather forecast. notice the weather front just to the south of us linked to this low pressure close to spain and portugal, the weather front will approach the channel coast during the course of the weekend. the initial thinking is that there might be some showers around on saturday, may be cornwall, devon, but the vast majority of the uk will be in for a fine day and again, that breeze quite nagging on some of the coasts, blowing out of the east northeast. but still, 23 in london, a bit fresher in the north around 16 for glasgow and edinburgh and belfast. those showers continue through the course of sunday clipping the south coast of england, again, midlands is looking pretty much dry and sunny. 20 degrees in birmingham, a little bit fresher there on the north sea coast, newcastle at 15 on sunday. monday and tuesday is expected to be settled again, with high—pressure close by, beyond that, it looks as though the atlantic is turning a little more unsettled and the weather fronts will be heading our way, so that does mean the weather will slowly turn more unsettled later, but until then, friday and into tuesday next week, for most of us, the weather looks fine with hints of that unsettled weather in the north. this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. i'm maryam moshiri. as the number of covid cases tops 30 million worldwide, the uk puts forward new plans for a circuit break against the virus. new lockdowns are to be announced in madrid, and it's the poorest neighbourhoods that are hit the hardest. after a month of protests, an official investigation will be opened in to the presidential election in belarus. hello and welcome. the number of officially recorded coronavirus cases

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