it's hardtalk with stephen sackur. 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 part of the problem? my guest, thomas chatterton williams, one is a mixed race american writer, a self—declared ex—black man, whose ideas present a 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. thanks for having me. well, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. thomas, i think 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. i'm just wondering how, as 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? sure. well, you know, race is constructed different ways in different locations, which is something i didn't know 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're black. the white kids i grew up around in newjersey didn't think of me 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 uncomplicated until the age of about 30, when i had moved to paris, married a blonde haired, blue—eyed white frenchwoman — who resembled my mother in her physical characteristics, actually, in terms of blonde hair and blue eyes — and i realised that if we were to have children, that they very well may not physically present as black. thomas, i'm going to stop you because this is such a fascinating story and i want to go through piece by piece. so if i take you back and rewind until you're 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 in that story is what your parents actually told you, because you have your black father, your white mother — what do they tell you you were as you were growing up, or what are they sort of encourage you to think? sure. so, you know, my father is old enough to be my grandfather — he was born in 1937 in longview, texas. he grew up fully under segregation, prior to civil rights — he was a adult before civil rights — so he is from an america that i really only know about from reading and from listening to him and other elders. but where he grew up, on the segregated side of town, you know, there were always people who looked white who are technically black, or who were believed to be black, or believed themselves to be black. so 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 constructed and real because we make it so as a society. so my mother and my father were 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, in 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, you were into rap culture and sort of popular black culture and then you decided that that was a very restricting, unsatisfactory sort of framework to express your identity and your blackness within, so you moved on from that, but nonetheless, i am very taken with something that 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 smilier moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed—race children. so there we have, just 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 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—eyed folks to people who look directly out of western africa. i believe that there was kind of a decision and a choice and a kind of duty to almost defend this identity — that i felt myself coming close to being perceived as having left behind. and, you know, when i wrote this op—ed in the new york times in 2012, you know, i — in retrospect can see that i was attempting to convince a readership of one. i was trying to persuade myself that having these children that i was aware were going to look most likely in ways that other people would not perceive as black, i was trying to convince myself that i was not giving up any so—called authenticity. it wasn't until i was actually living with them not as ideas but as actual flesh and blood human beings that i realised that 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, you know, you — your ideas evolved not so much around a corner but a complete u—turn. so that, you know, when you and your french wife had kids, it seems that changed everything and you decided you weren't black at all? well, it is a little more complicated than that. first of all, it is important to — i'd been living in france for several years at this point and it is important to understand that the french don't have a conception of the one drop rule — that's 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 metis, which would be mixed, and that's its own kind of category. and they never had slavery but within the bounds of their own societies, so 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 but 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, you know, 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 was 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. right. but so maybe i have misunderstood things but i thought had pretty much declared that you were, to coin a phrase i have seen, an ex—black man. that you renounced the notion of you being 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 that everybody else is white and black and that these qualities are real, these categories are real. it's that i'm saying that i'm ex—black man because i'm saying that 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. right, but this is so — if i may, thomas, sorry to interrupt — but 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 that 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 — you know, 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. i mean, you cannot renounce your race, can you, in that way? well, you can make — you can rebel against what you consider to be a mistaken and unjust order. a police officer can stop me and consider me black and kill me, and that would be a racialised death if he were to do that. but that doesn't mean i have to accept his definition of reality when i create my own sense of reality. crosstalk. but you can't escape from his, you know, 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 "well, here is thomas chatterton williams. he writes for the new york times and the new yorker and atlantic magazine, all of these influential magazines. 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. 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 constant negotiation between 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 accept that sense of myself that the french system of reality thrusts on me. it does not mean that people who are racialised as black in america need to reify or reinforce that sense of themselves by embracing the mistaken racial categorisation society thrusts on them, and continuing to reproduce it. so i think that people have to do two things at once — they have to fight against the racism that actually exists in the world that they encounter, and they have to keep their eyes on a future that no longer has need for these antiquated ways of seeing that 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 — that what you want to see is a return to a childlike notion that, you know, 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 know, you have to kind of demand things that seem unreal in the moment in order to make progress. you know, james baldwin, to paraphrase, said something like, you know, anytime you acquiesce to the idea that some people are white and some people are black, you are buying into a delusion. and, you know, to escape that 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 and 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 cannotjust 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 quote of them all, martin luther king, saying people should bejudged not by the 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 for justice. and your approach seems to be almost to say "well, because i do not accept the sort of binary black—white paradigm, i am sort of opting out of the struggle. and you clearly have a problem with black lives matter but... no, no, iwould 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 make our multi—ethnic societies work. we're not gonna stop being multi—ethnic societies in the united kingdom, in america, in france, in many western democracies. how are we gonna make these societies work? is it going to be by doubling down and reinforcing the mistaken notion that we are separate races and that therefore every separate racial category must be somehow equally respected, even though these colour categories necessarily imply higher archaical arrangements, coming from slavery? or is the way we make our multi—ethnic societies function better by trying to actually live up to the idea of transcendent humanism, in which people are individuals, not avatars of groups broadly defined, abstractly coloured ? how do we make that function? black lives matter you mentioned. 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 1,000 people or more a year of all physical varieties, of all so—called racial backgrounds. they kill about 500 white people a year in america and they kill disproportionately a lot of black and native american people in america. so 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 there are actually are black lives that are fundamentally, essentially 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 very long ago on the show, i interviewed the american philosopher and podcaster sam harris, who has a big following across the us, and he basically said "i have a profound problem with black lives matter because to me, it is another form of corrosive identity politics". and i'm not so sure that — pretty much, you are saying the same thing, aren't you? and you're saying it, actually, as a man who was brought up as a — to be feeling for himself to be a black man in the united states. but you're saying this form of politics is corrosive, aren't you? i'm saying that for any video that you see that is mobilised people's outrage recently of a black man — even of a black man like 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. what i'm saying is that what is our goal? if our goal is to eliminate these kinds of abuses and to de—escalate violent confrontations with our over—militarised police forces, then my thinking is that the best way to do that is to make — to get a broad—based consensus that brings people together, as opposed to — makes people believe that this is somehow a racialised abuse that only affects one demographic and therefore, they can tune out or can even antagonise people — as we have seen in some of the excessive violence associated with protests over the summer have done, after an initial outpouring of sympathy for the cause. i do not think that we're gonna get to a better future by fracturing ourselves into ever more hyper—specific identity categories. crosstalk. thomas, your memoirs and your journalism and your writing have brought you into conflict with what one might call the progressive some would say ‘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, in a form which does not degenerate into name—calling? well, twitter is not the best place probably to engage these debates. i find that publishing long—form essays and reportage is pretty good. and ifind that, you know, coming on programmes like yours is a good way of speaking about ideas. but a lot of the 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 kind of pseudo—religious kind of speechifying that brooks no dissent. so we don't really have a debate going on, except for one that speaks past each other. so i've come in for criticism but unfortunately, i have really never been able to address directly some of the people you might be referring to, other than behind the scenes. the thing is, it — what you did do in the summer, which was very high profile — was you were one of the sort of prime movers in a letter, jointly signed — i think through harper's magazine it was published — pretty much 150 very well—known writers, authors, novelists, all sorts of people, including very famous figures like jk rowling, martin amis and others. they all put their names to this sort of condemnation of what you called ‘cancel culture‘ — the idea that there is some sort of new woke, progressive censoriousness which is damping down on people like you, avowed liberals, expressing ideas that do not go with the woke consensus. though surely the truth is you have an amazing platform, as do all the other 150 people complaining about cancel culture. what is this cancel culture you speak of? well, yeah, the first thing is that we were very purposeful about not using that term — we never say "cancel culture" because that's already been something co—opted and corrupted by — in a very disingenuous way by donald trump and others coming from the right. what we identify as a kind of urge to silence, publicly shame and, most importantly, keep from being gainfully employed people whose views and speech offends some group. and this kind of censoriousness comes from both the left and the right. but it's true that in the media and cultural institutions that many of our signatories find ourselves in, it's coming often from the left. and so, i don't think that many of us were arguing for ourselves, though — although i'm sure that i'm not in the position ofjk rowling or salman rushdie — but i think that most of us saw this letter as a way of speaking up on behalf of people that are — whose names will not be on a letter, people who are seeing what happens tojk rowling when she descends from the consensus view, or seeing what happens to bari weiss or seeing what happened to salman rushdie when he had a fatwa, we can see what happened to kamel daoud in iran with a fatwa currently. people like that who then narrow themselves and don't feel... hang on a minute! you cannot throw in these fatwas — you know, most famous of which was against salman rushdie — because if you do that, you are sort of making an equivalence between islamist fundamentalists opposing everything that they see as a transgression of their religious ideology, and people on the left who simply think that certain things said about transgenderism 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 of the signatories, garry kasparov or some who do have fatwas, to some who escaped authoritarian regimes in iran and elsewhere, to dwayne betts, the poet who spent eight years in a maximum security prison since the age of 16 and then graduated from yale law school afterwards, a lot of these people who have been through serious forms of silencing believe it operates on a continuum, so... isn't it — there was a counter letter after yours, signed by a whole bunch of other writers — jeff yang, i believe, was one of them, he works for the wall street journal. he said "it is hard not to see thomas‘" — that's your letter — "as merely an elegantly written affirmation of elitism and privilege by people have absolutely no problem expressing their views." he's got a point, hasn't he? i don't think so, actually. first of all, my inbox is flooded with messages from people who would not be considered elites, who might be assistant book editors or associate professors without tenure at colleges, who said that the letter really was a shot in the arm or maybe even allowed them to feel that they might possibly be able to express themselves. people have written us to tell us that they have never once said what they actually think in the context of a work environment because they don't believe that they could survive that. so i think that this letter was on behalf 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 a kind act of generosity. they — malcolm gladwell doesn't need to sign a letter or do anything else. he doesn'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's a pleasure. thank you. hello there. it's going to settle down as we move into the christmas period with high—pressure dominating. we should see quite a bit of sunshine but also some frost. before we reach that point, quite a bit of rain in the forecast for wednesday, particularly across the southern half of the country. all tied in with this area of low pressure. this is the high—pressure that's going to a node for the christmas period. we have to contend with this first. it's going to bring a lot of cloud across much of england and wales through the day today. some of it will be heavy, and particularly from wales through the midlands across into east anglia, there is a chance of flooding in places as the ground is saturated from other recent rain. rain everywhere, there will be drier, brighter spells around, very mild in the south, but in scotland and northern ireland, they will see the best and the brightest, but it will be cold with some wintry showers over the north. as that area of low pressure pulls away, we will start to see northerly gales develop across parts of wales, western england around the channel for a time, and then we will see further showers across the northern half of the country. these will be wintry over the high ground. much colder air starts to sink southwards as we move through wednesday night. you can see a widespread frost across central and northern areas. so this area of high pressure eventually topples in from the west for christmas eve. quite a few isobars in the charts across the eastern part of the country. so it will be windy here and that's going to dragon a few showers for christmas eve here. mainly rain and lower levels, we could see some wintryness over the high ground from a one or two dotted around western coasts, but for it's a cold start but a brighter day, plenty of sunshine across england and wales. a bit of thought across the far north of scotland. those temperatures four to seven degrees, at on the wind, it will feel pretty cold. then for christmas day itself, we continue with our area of high—pressure and start to see this weather front arriving later on in the day. we start christmas morning off on a cold note under clear skies, we will see a widespread frost to greet us for christmas morning. there will be plenty of sparkling sunshine as well, especially for england and wales as we start to see more cloud across the north and west as that weather front i showed you begins to bring some wetter and windier weather certainly to western scotland. and a cold day for christmas day four to 7 degrees. as we head on into boxing day, much more unsettled, very windy, widespread gales outbreaks of rain, that is also lasting into sunday with sunshine and showers. this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. france re—opens its border to britain after a two—day closure leaves thousands of lorries stuck in south—east england. freight drivers and eu citizens will be allowed in but only if they can provide a negative coronavirus test. this will take two or three days for things to be cleared, and before that, callers should not move themselves to kent, it won't speed things up for you. you're better off waiting where you are and awaiting further instructions. as the us congress passes a coronavirus relief package, president—electjoe biden warns the worst is yet to come. 0ur darkest days in the battle against covid are ahead of us, not behind us.

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