From the “Shaping an Omni American Future” online colloquium in 2021
Greg Thomas:
Thanks for joining us from Paris, Thomas. Let’s go back to the beginning. When did you first read the work of Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison?
Thomas Chatterton Williams:
Hard to pinpoint an exact moment with Murray. With Ellison, I remember very well that I had spent my junior year summer abroad in France, and was taking the train between a small town called Tours and Paris and talking to another student from the University of Chicago who was asking me if I had read Invisible Man, and I said, “No.” And he said, “Oh man, that’s crazy. You have to read it like tomorrow. It’s the most incredible novel I’ve ever read.” People actually very rarely talk that way, so I immediately had to read it – and I was pretty astonished.
I would compare the feeling to when I encountered Moby Dick; I was expecting something to be from another time, and it felt completely fresh in a way that the best art does. It felt like the language was alive. And I also was astonished by the boldness of Ellison’s vision; certain images just changed the way that I think about race. And I came to think about my own place in society and society at large, the image of the narrator at Liberty Paints realizing that to get the whitest shade of paint, they drop a drop of pitch black paint into it and stir it. And that metaphor for the mongrel nature of American society, that it’s the mixture that makes it what it is, and [that] you actually can’t erase the blackness – and you wouldn’t want to. So that really just astonished me.
That was before I was even consciously trying to be a writer. Then later, when I was in graduate school at NYU, around 2006, I began reading Stanley Crouch. I became friends with him, and through knowing Crouch, I found Murray. I got The Omni-Americans at some point, and then I said, “Wait a minute.” Then I did my research on their relationship, and I thought, Invisible Man is coming out of ideas that Ellison had been talking about with Murray that they were developing as students at Tuskegee. It’s difficult to know if Invisible Man is a singular achievement — with no shade to Ellison — or if it’s more of a culture they were collectively creating, which was extraordinary. So that’s a long way of saying that I encountered Invisible Man first, and through that, I got my foot and my mind into this kind of larger ecosystem that Murray’s very much a part of.
I did my research on their relationship, and I thought, Invisible Man is coming out of ideas that Ellison had been talking about with Murray that they were developing as students at Tuskegee. It's difficult to know if Invisible Man is a singular achievement — with no shade to Ellison — or if it's more of a culture they were collectively creating, which was extraordinary.
Greg Thomas:
And what was your first impression of Murray when you read him?
Thomas Chatterton Williams:
The more important figure. And that’s a very difficult thing to say because, for me, Ellison is the preeminent American novelist. But the way that the ideas and the thinking were distilled and the uniqueness of the essays, the uniqueness of the way that Murray went about thinking publicly, and the dignity with which he did this work without worrying about whose shadow might be cast over him, who might be getting more attention… Starting in his fifties to do this kind of work and then really doing it better than just about anybody. And just being comfortable in his own critical mode.
I started to think The Omni-Americans might be the most extraordinary nonfiction book I’d ever read.
The idea that American society is based on these regionalisms, these regional characters: the Yankee, the backwoodsman, the Native American, and the African, or more specifically what they both called, insisted on calling, the American Negro. This figure was profoundly, distinctly, quintessentially American and was American precisely because this figure combined within herself all of the fundamental archetypes of American culture, of American democracy. That was such a profound insight to me. And then I went back and, as an adult, read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. This is an insight that he had in the 1830s. This is different, this is a new society. These are new people. This culture inextricably links these archetypes; these peoples from the Old World combined in the New World with the Native Americans and created something new. And Murray explained that to me more clearly than anybody else I’d ever encountered, including James Baldwin.
Greg Thomas:
Wow. Your latest book, Self-Portrait in Black and White, has an epigraph from Ellison’s classic Invisible Man, which you’ve already mentioned. Later in the work, you said that the tradition your “father belonged to was the open omni-faceted one of Albert Murray.” Ellison and Murray’s oeuvre and the work of our mutual friend, Stanley Crouch, emphasized culture over what Stanley called a decoy of race. Did their emphasis on culture over race lay a foundation for your current retirement from race?
Thomas Chatterton Williams:
Culture ‒ and I would take that back, again, to regional cultures ‒ is a more profound way of thinking of oneself. We think of ourselves through the specificity of where we come from, what community shaped us, what time and place we are moving through the world in. That that was more important than race, yes, Ellison articulated that for me, but this is something my father modeled for me, and I intuited through my father’s presence in my life before I consciously encountered it on the page. So my father, like Ellison, is from the Southwest; he’s from Texas, from East Texas. He was born in Longview and grew up in Galveston, this little island, but he considers himself from the Southwest of the United States. And Ellison was very deliberate in how he presented himself as being from Oklahoma, and that’s different from being from Mississippi or just being monolithically Black.
And so my father was Black. He explained to me that he was socially constructed as Black in American society, but that for him, he was regionally Southwestern and that, furthermore, biologically, race is not a meaningful category. These were ways of talking and thinking that were present in my house. When I encountered that quote of Ellison’s that I used in my book, “Blood and skin do not think,” that was just such a pithy way of saying what I think my father was always telling me, that you are who you are. You come from a place, your pigment, the way that people racialize you within the society that’s based on the collision of Africa and Europe through slavery, that will matter in your life, but that’s not who you are. You can’t allow that to be, and you don’t think through your epidermis. That’s not the measure of you, or anyone else, for that matter, no matter what anybody else tries to insist.
So I felt that my father is not a writer, he’s an intellectual, and he was more of a Socratic intellectual in that it was all ‒ he’s still with us, thankfully ‒ it was all through the speaking. He didn’t leave any writing, but I felt that he was very much of a way of being, I guess you would call it, Negro in American society in the 20th century, that was very much… it was in harmony with how these other men were Negroes in American society in the 20th century.
Greg Thomas:
Finally, do you think the power of culture can adequately fight against the various forms of bigotry, of which antisemitism and racism are examples? If so, why? If not, why not?
Thomas Chatterton Williams:
Culture, cultural exchange, cultural understanding, and interest in our own and other cultures, is the only way we’ll transcend some of these divisions. I think that I’ve devoted quite a lot of my career to trying to push back against the idea that what we call race is scientifically meaningful, valid, or, even as a social construct, the right way to go about thinking of ourselves and each other. And that using culture to understand ourselves and each other is a more sure-footed way of doing it. What is a culture that unites people who are designated Jews, or what is a culture that unites people who are designated Black in America – as opposed to designated Black in France or other parts of the world – and are there some cultural aspects that you stretch back to Africa that unite the Black diaspora, wherever it may be found?
I've devoted quite a lot of my career to trying to push back against the idea that what we call race is scientifically meaningful, valid, or, even as a social construct, the right way to go about thinking of ourselves and each other.
Those are interesting questions, and it has nothing to do with blood and skin, but they might have to do with traditions that are meaningful to hold onto and to understand and not to police in a way that I think we’re encouraged to talk about culture nowadays, which is to say that some people own some traditions and other people don’t, so some people have to grant permission, and if you have privilege in this matrix in society, then you can never use this culture.
Culture is a complicated and potentially dangerous way of sorting ourselves, but it offers more hope and promise than the racial dynamic we’re caught in. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that’s a fully satisfactory answer. But we should find good faith, honest, sincere ways of engaging with one another’s cultures. We should forget about terms like cultural appropriation and realize that most of what has happened in human history to make the kind of societies grow and progress the way that they have is a kind of cultural synthesis between peoples.
And so I think America at its best, why it’s such an inspiration — I live in France — why America has always been such an inspiration to Europeans, going back to Tocqueville, going back as far as the founding, is that America represents a genuinely new synthesis in the world. It created modernisms such as jazz, which I know you’re very interested in. This is cultural synthesis at its best, and I think that a common American culture we really believe in and build together would also help heal the so-called racial divisions that are tearing us apart.