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Williams, who is half-black and half-white, doubtless partly desires this because of his own oft-stated discomfort with his blackness; it was he, after all, who described black fans of hip-hop in his first book, a 2010 memoir, as “psyching themselves up like child soldiers drunk off blood in some war-ravaged African province.” This is the kind of language that, had it been employed by a white critic describing jazz (a genre Williams ironically proclaims to enjoy) in the early 20th century, would have been both commonplace and nakedly racist, conjuring up a trope of Africa as a wild world that is meant to suggest not civilization or complexity, but war and savagery. Williams, whose entire career has been predicated on writing about race, wants as little to do with race as possible, explaining the letter’s feeble gesturing to the protests.
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