Self Identity

The howl of the bedside clock-radio carves through your dreams like a buzz-saw through butter, and you are awake. In another place. Never mind the bright yellow sunlight that flecks your pillow and warms your face. You are rudely awake, and resent it.

I didn’t choose to be born. In other words, I didn’t choose to exist. I didn’t choose my parents or my circumstances. I definitely did not choose my looks or my personality. And yet these things and these people seem to define me. I didn’t choose for those bad things to happen. But they mark me. They made me fear, fight, be insecure, and even do things I wish I didn’t do. And now these things seem to define me. How do I get out of this maze? Who am I really? Where do I belong? God says, ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love,’ and ‘before you were born I called you by ...

What is the value of one powerful question? What about one life changing answer? This book asks questions geared towards a sense of knowing who you are at your core. These questions are thought-provoking, challenging, and inspiring. Most importantly, they are life changing! Truth is - no two individuals are created exactly alike! God, in his infinite wisdom, created every person with a unique identity and purpose.

How much longer will the memories and pain of childhood hinder you from achieving your dreams and living the full life you were promised and created to experience? The world needs what is on the inside of you because you are an answer to a problem. Inwardly, you know this, but you have to see yourself as the new you versus the little, broken you.

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multi-generational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a 'black' father from the segregated South and a 'white' mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of 'black blood' makes a person black.