Quotes from Thomas Chatterton Williams

We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

I'm the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South.

The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.

I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.

When I was in college, the Roots, the sui generis ensemble from Philadelphia encompassing all manner of black music, played a show on campus.

I consciously learned and performed my race like a teacher's pet in an advanced placement course on black masculinity.

My family matters most to me, even though so much of our daily lives and commitments make it so difficult to be as present with those you love as you might wish.

What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's web of problems called race, its received and dangerous habits of thinking about and organizing people along a binary of white and black, free and unfree, even once I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.

I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day. I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.

Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair.

Being fired for bad performance or for having an alter ego that posts incredibly racist stuff is not cancel culture.

Between my freshman and senior years of high school in the late '90s, my father spent his evenings, weekends and vacations drilling my best friend and me for our SATs.

In my own young black life, I have done my part to gentrify a half-dozen mixed neighborhoods ranging from Spanish Harlem to Fort Greene to the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Many of my well-educated black, Latino, Asian and Arab friends have done the same.

I write a lot about race precisely because I don't believe it's real.

The problem of racial difference in America - and in modern life more broadly - is always presented as an economic, political, biological or cultural problem. But I want to say that it's at least as much a philosophical and imaginative disaster.

I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it.

I momentarily but genuinely believed that Barack Obama was the answer not only to our nation's depressing politics but to the question of our racial enlightenment.

A lot of people say there's no such thing as cancel culture and then you name an example and they're, like, 'That person deserved it,' so then there is cancel culture, but it works in its accountability.

People will always look different from each other in ways we can't control. What we can control is what we allow ourselves to make of those differences.

Intellectual development was paramount to my father, of course, but he was hardly a geek. He was a man who happened to be of a certain Southern culture and a certain age, and his talents and tastes had been molded accordingly.

Though I'd always known in an intellectual way that rock and roll was a 'black' form - the way I know that English breakfast tea is Indian - I had never felt this truth.

If liberals no longer pride themselves on being the adults in the room, the bulwark against the whims of the mob, our national descent into chaos will be complete.

As we all know, the evil of slavery and the sting of the whip have given us many things including the voice of Nina Simone, the prose of James Baldwin, the Air Jordan sneaker, the blues, jazz, moonwalking, and more recently gangsta rap.