Dear Reader, Ever since the publication of “Black and Blue and Blond” by Thomas Chatterton Williams in the Virginia Quarterly Review, we have thought about the delicate question of skin color in the black American experience. Blackness is less than skin color and more than skin color. Writer Thomas Chatterton Williams grappled with this question in all of its nuance and complexity. And, in the end, he came to terms with the risk of permanently killing off the culture, “blackness,” as the black father of a blond, blue-eyed baby girl named Marlow. There was a place until recently in the culture for Marlow in American blackness, Williams wrote, but not so much Paris where Williams lives with his French wife, Valentine, and two blue-eyed, blond children.