A lot of people say there's no such thing as cancel culture and then you name an example and they're, like, 'That person deserved it,' so then there is cancel culture, but it works in its accountability.
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I write a lot about race precisely because I don't believe it's real.
A fatherless boy raised in Jim Crow Texas, my dad was a tenacious autodidact, the first in his family to get a college degree.
In 'Losing My Cool,' I argue repeatedly that it is a terrible lie, which has been foisted on us and sold to us for decades now, that hip-hop culture equals black culture, that being authentically black means keeping it real.
My father 'Pappy' who is black, is from Galveston and Fort Worth, Texas. My mother, who is white, is from San Diego.
Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.
It is mind-blowing to pause and think that a film as forward-facing and potent as 'Do the Right Thing' was released the same year as 'Driving Ms. Daisy.'
I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it.
There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we're really talking about is class or, more accurate still, manners, values and taste.
I think it's absolutely undeniable that nobody really advocates for complete total speech without any consequence or absolute freedom of expression. There's a line that most of us agree on somewhere.
Being fired for bad performance or for having an alter ego that posts incredibly racist stuff is not cancel culture.
Almost every summer, my wife and I, now with two kids in tow, spend a couple of weeks in Italy.
To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we've endured.
Whenever I ask myself what blackness means to me, I am struck by the parallels that exist between my predicament and that of many Western Jews, who struggle with questions of assimilation at a time when marrying outside the faith is common.
Throughout all of life's little interruptions and distractions, I prided myself on keeping my work focused and relatively unscathed.
A couple of years ago, leaving a restaurant near the Louvre, I held the door for a black man in a camel overcoat. Only as he passed did I realize it was the rapper Kanye West.
Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.
Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?
In my own young black life, I have done my part to gentrify a half-dozen mixed neighborhoods ranging from Spanish Harlem to Fort Greene to the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Many of my well-educated black, Latino, Asian and Arab friends have done the same.
If liberals no longer pride themselves on being the adults in the room, the bulwark against the whims of the mob, our national descent into chaos will be complete.
I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I've never felt safer or less harassed anywhere.
I do not propose to solve the Israeli-Palestine conflict. But I do think the world would be a vastly safer place - and maybe a happier one, too - if more of us learned to see beyond our biases, our preferences, and became optimists capable of letting go.
I think I was drawn to black culture by the same things that have been drawing the entire world to it since the days of Richard Wright, Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. This culture is original, potent and seductive.
There were books all over the house, and I was always told that I could write and that it was something good to do. So when I finally did it, it wasn't so strange or bizarre.
The United States was founded on the triple sin of slavery, genocide, and land theft.
As we all know, the evil of slavery and the sting of the whip have given us many things including the voice of Nina Simone, the prose of James Baldwin, the Air Jordan sneaker, the blues, jazz, moonwalking, and more recently gangsta rap.
Most so-called 'black' people do not feel themselves at liberty to simply turn off or ignore their allotted racial designation, whether they would like to or not.
Of all the things I feel, I do not feel myself to be a victim - not in any collectively accessible way.
The name Albert Murray was never household familiar. Yet he was one of the truly original minds of 20th-century American letters.
Years ago, I worked briefly as a consultant for Sciences-Po, one of Paris's famed grandes ecoles, encouraging American high school students and their parents to pursue an English-language education abroad.
As a 'parisien d'adoption,' I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric.
I grew up in New Jersey, but my parents are from out west. They moved the family to New Jersey when my father, a sociologist by training, took a job in Newark running anti-poverty programs for the Episcopal Archdiocese.
What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's web of problems called race, its received and dangerous habits of thinking about and organizing people along a binary of white and black, free and unfree, even once I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.
Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American.
Jacques Audiard has always been an outlier in a French film industry that is starkly bifurcated between high and low.
I had the benefit, I'll say it, of coming up behind my brother and seeing what he went through and just simply trying do the opposite oftentimes.
There can be no dragon slayer in the absence of dragons.
Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with 'keeping it real' are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.
At various points in my own life, I have been laughed at scathingly for calling myself black.
My family matters most to me, even though so much of our daily lives and commitments make it so difficult to be as present with those you love as you might wish.
Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor.
The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.
Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black - and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.
We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.
I'm descended from southern slaves, and I'm descended on my mother's side from northern European Protestant immigrants.
I've been socially deemed black in America, and this is a category that's been hurting my family for generations and that has also led to extraordinary cultural contributions that I'm very proud of, but it's not a real category and our society is damaged by insisting on it.
White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.
I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.
I'm the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South.
When I look at my daughter now, I see another facet of myself, I see my own inimitable child.
