thomas chatterton williams in paris, welcome to hardtalk. thanks for having me.pleasure to have you on the show. thomas, i think we need to begin with a little bit of your personal story. you were born in the united states to a black father and a white mother. i'm just wondering how, as a child — now that you have had many, many years to reflect on it — how did you forge your own sense of identity, coming from a mixed—race family? sure. well, you know, race is constructed different ways in different locations, which is something i didn't know coming up in the ‘80s and ‘90s in newjersey. ijust knew that i was the son of a black man from the segregated south and a white mother from out west in california. and the culture that i grew up in was one in which the logic of what we called the ‘one drop rule‘ prevailed, which was essentially if you have any black ancestry at all, then you're black. the white kids i grew up around in newjersey didn't think of me as white and the black kids i grew up around were accustomed to accepting any manner of different skin tones and

because i don't know if you know him, but we had a writer on recently on the programme, thomas chatterton williams wants to see and call himself as a black man because his father was from the deep south, the ancestor of slaves, a black man, but his mother was white and he married a white woman. he's since had blonde, blue—eyed children. he says, looking at my own children, "it makes no sense for me to identify as a black man. "i find it limiting and i don't want to be put in any box." that's. .. you know, it's not a box. i don't think it's box. you know, people have white identities. they have brown identities, black identities. and to be black in the world is to align yourself in one sense with a billion people on the african continent, on the african continent. there are more brown people in the world than white people. so there is nothing limiting about it. now, i am mixed race myself so i could identify as white. but let's see how far i get with that, right? mm. i would have to wear a banner, right, saying i am white so that when you see me and treat me certain way, um, please remember that i