Thomas Chatterton Williams, a public intellectual of some standing in the US, dislikes the Trumpian right for its erratic authoritarianism. But he dislikes its hysterical leftwing critics too – arguably with more vehemence. He takes great pride in having no truck with tribes, but he does belong to one: like halitosis, as Terry Eagleton quipped, ideology appears to be only what the other person has. Williams may think he is a freethinker above the fray, but he has a creed – and it is liberal complacency.
His 2010 debut memoir Losing My Cool was the story of – as the subtitle had it – Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd. Rap, he declared, was not so much a genre as a subculture, seducing young black men into a world of crime. That, apparently, would have been Williams’s fate (when he physically attacks his girlfriend, for instance, hip-hop lyrics shoulder the blame) had it not been for Pappy, his disciplinarian father, who foisted 15,000 books on him.
The classics beat crime in the end, and we leave Williams on his happy road to intellectualdom, absorbing Sartre in Parisian cafes. But it wasn’t enough for him to merely present his own story; Williams elected to hold up his life as an example for black Americans. “See, you can be just like me” is the breathless gist of Losing My Cool. It never struck him that he might have had certain class advantages – a father with a PhD in sociology; a mixed-race heritage; an upbringing in white, bourgeois, suburban New Jersey – that make him somewhat unrepresentative as a role model.
Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Williams’s second memoir, published just before the pandemic, served up more hyper-agentic advice. The springboard for these post-racial reflections was the birth of his daughter. Bearing, as babies tend to do, a resemblance to her mother, who is white and French, Williams’s child is blond. It follows that there is an arbitrariness to the whole business of race, from which Williams swiftly emancipates himself. Then comes the counsel: black Americans would do well to follow in his footsteps by “transcending” race themselves. Conceding that this may be an easier proposition for him and his white-passing daughter, he exhorts mixed-race people to “form an avant garde when it comes to rejecting race”.
Williams’s grand subject being himself, now we have a third memoir. Summer of Our Discontent takes a caustic look at Black Lives Matter from the lofty vantage point of his Parisian garret. At the outset, he tells us that the self-preening, race-mad identity politics of left-leaning liberals has fostered atomisation and precluded solidarity. As a consequence, the illiberal, unhinged right, now united behind Trump, has stolen a march on them. But from this not unreasonable edifice, Williams throws up a enormous scaffolding of enemies, which comes to encompass anyone and everyone engaging in some form or another of collective action. Ultimately, by the end, it appears that Williams’s beef is not so much with Trump as with his leftwing critics.
This is a strange, muddled book. On the one hand, Williams emphasises the primacy of class over race in the US. George Floyd, he says, was not your average African American: he was poor, unemployed, and had a criminal record. Horrific as his killing by a white policeman was, it was unduly racialised by BLM. Fewer than 25 unarmed black civilians are killed by police annually. Most black people will never find themselves in Floyd’s shoes, Williams contends.
While class is important for Williams, class politics isn’t. There is only so much that initiatives to lift the poor from poverty can achieve, we are told, because “the fundamental political unit, going back to Aristotle, remains the family”. The left has got it all wrong, obsessing over the “macro level” when real change apparently happens at the individual level.
Williams’s strategy is to cherrypick the most ludicrous examples of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to smear the entire left. Sympathy from a few celebrities for the actor Jussie Smollett – who was accused of faking a hate-crime against himself, which he denied – is taken as evidence of the left’s crumbling “moral authority and credibility”. BLM, he claims, was driven by “an ascendant raider class” of middle-class and not always black activists seizing institutional power – such as when a “multi-ethnic mob of junior employees” ousted New York Times opinion editor James Bennet for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s call to deploy troops against BLM protests.
Williams’s other objections appear to be mostly aesthetic. He expends much energy pillorying the performative activism of such BLM “allies” as “the official Twitter account of the wildly popular British children’s cartoon Peppa Pig”, which tweeted a black square in solidarity. Later, visiting BLM-ravaged Portland, he mourns that “a beloved statue of an elk has been toppled”. This in a town with a “well-deserved reputation” for “exquisite gastronomy”. Quelle horreur.
He concludes by suggesting that the left and right are just as odious as one another. The storming of the Capitol in 2021, he says, had a mimetic quality, the populist right “aping” the “flamboyant reflex” of the unruly left. With such invidious comparisons, and with such a dim view of collective action, Williams is unable to make the case as to how precisely his homeland is to move towards a post-racial utopia. Excelling in sending up bien-pensant opinion, he has no answers. Fixated on slagging off the left, he has marooned himself on an island of vacuity. So when he articulates a positive vision of the future, all he offers are new age nostrums such as “reinvestment in lived community” and “truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice”.
His plea for perspective is similarly misplaced. Young black Americans, Williams whinges, have been seduced by the race pessimism of the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, his more popular nemesis. He enjoins us to look on the bright side: the racial wage gap is closing; black school attainment rates are nearing white levels.
Williams’s Panglossian outlook is, I suspect, a form of American parochialism. His homeland, he says, is a “society that is frankly more democratic, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian than any other in recorded history”. The Gini coefficient and Democracy Index beg to differ. There are eminently sensible reasons for race pessimism in America. Segregation and ghettoisation are facts of life. The wage gap between black and white people is still a staggering 21% (in Britain, it’s under 6%). White Americans live three-and-a-half years longer than black Americans on average (black Britons outlive white Britons).
Collectively, it was not the complacent optimists (who declared we had never had it so good) but rather the do-gooding pessimists (that demanded change at the dreaded “macro level”) who overthrew slavery and fought for civil rights. Individually, too, pessimism pays. For someone who sets great store by personal agency, Williams will no doubt appreciate Billy Wilder’s melancholy observation – occasioned by losing three relatives at Auschwitz – that “the optimists died in the gas chambers; the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills”.
