Williams, too, is a fan of the book Racecraft. His distinct understanding of what its insights imply for blackness in America is evident in a profile of the intellectual Albert Murray that he wrote for The Nation in 2016. According to Williams, Murray emphasized that the problems of black people, while conditioned by American history, “were also timelessly and irrevocably universal, capable of being described and transcended to the same extent that humans have dealt with tragedy and chased away the blues since a man calling himself Homer went about recording the exploits of his spiteful, blood-lusting neighbors.”

This was not “a frivolous or flippant denial of the specificity of black pain,” Williams wrote, yet Murray’s approach did trouble some readers, he continued, because “it destabilizes the understandable, if Pyrrhic, comfort many feel in raging against the seemingly limitless capacity of white people to oppress.”

In Williams’s telling, “Murray thought that images of blacks as wretched victims, only ever smoldering in righteous rage or wailing in ceaseless agony under the clenched fist of white supremacy, images popular in his day and again popular in ours, are irredeemably inadequate and consequently worthy of sustained and serious interrogation.” Noting that Murray grew up with a loving adoptive father who could have passed for white but refused to do so, he argued: “What Murray discovered... was the fundamental insight that there’s nowhere good America can hope to get to when the starting point remains the illusion of race.”

As with that first Washington Post op-ed, most readers of The Nation essay could not know that the arguments and analysis Williams offered were rooted in and informed by an inquiry into his most personal experiences. The same goes for readers of his 2017 New Yorker essay on the French roots of the white nationalist phrase “Jews will not replace us” and his New York Times op-ed from the same year arguing that “woke” discourse is “in sync with” though not morally equivalent to the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides reduce people to abstract color categories, he wrote in the Times, “feeding off of and legitimizing each other,” while those searching for common ground “get devoured twice.”

The personal experiences that informed those arguments are brought to the surface in Self-Portrait. That Marlow is fair skinned means she won’t face a society that gives her no choice but to be black, as her grandfather did, or a subculture that encourages her to adopt a false understanding of authentic blackness, like her father did. To become herself rather than succumbing to the identity that They foist upon her, she will need to grapple with Their belief that she is white.

Her father is trying to set an example that she can consult when that day comes. “I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it,” he writes. He sees whiteness as a disastrous illusion undergirding all aspects of race, so whether an essentialist belief in it “results from vicious bigotry or well-meaning anti-racism,” it must be overcome. So too must “the proud and resilient identities that formed in reaction to it,” since whiteness and blackness are both built on pernicious falsehoods. They must rise or fall, persist or give way, together. “I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day,” he emphasizes. “I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.”