What Happened When My Daughter Was Born Looking White - And I Wasn’t (#277)

In a Paris hospital delivery room, Thomas Chatterton Williams, acclaimed writer for The Atlantic and author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, held his newborn daughter for the first time. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. And in that moment, everything he thought he knew about race shattered. The son of a Black father from Texas and a white mother, he had grown up accepting America’s racial categories, until fatherhood made him question them all. His conclusion? He stopped calling himself Black. And his reasons might change how you think about race, identity, and George Floyd.