Quotes from Thomas Chatterton Williams

We would have a much more honest and respected political system if the Republican party could no longer squeeze out as much success from white resentment and white identity politics.

Pent-up white racism did fire Mr. Trump's candidacy, and he happily fanned the flames.

I have spent my whole life earnestly believing the fundamental American dictum that a single 'drop of black blood' makes a person 'black' primarily because they can never be 'white.'

When I look at my daughter now, I see another facet of myself, I see my own inimitable child.

Mobs in the street tearing down Ulysses S. Grant statues is a really chilling sight.

I grew up in New Jersey, but my parents are from out west. They moved the family to New Jersey when my father, a sociologist by training, took a job in Newark running anti-poverty programs for the Episcopal Archdiocese.

To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we've endured.

As fearsome as Covid-19 is, it is not the Nazis.

There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we're really talking about is class or, more accurate still, manners, values and taste.

If white people on a larger scale really de-emphasized their whiteness, I think that would have to transform the Republican party into a more responsible party that couldn't get by on just playing into white resentment, especially white middle and working class resentment while taking care of the interests of plutocrats.

The ideal post-Trump politician will, at the very least, be a deeply serious figure with a strong record of public service behind her.

I think it's absolutely undeniable that nobody really advocates for complete total speech without any consequence or absolute freedom of expression. There's a line that most of us agree on somewhere.

My father 'Pappy' who is black, is from Galveston and Fort Worth, Texas. My mother, who is white, is from San Diego.

A fatherless boy raised in Jim Crow Texas, my dad was a tenacious autodidact, the first in his family to get a college degree.

It is mind-blowing to pause and think that a film as forward-facing and potent as 'Do the Right Thing' was released the same year as 'Driving Ms. Daisy.'

If the idea of separate human races is a mistake to begin with, then monoracial forms of identification are fictitious and counterproductive.

I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I've never felt safer or less harassed anywhere.

The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.

Doubtless, reading good books benefited me during the months and years of writing, yet I remained skeptical of any tight correlation to what I produced. That was naive.

White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.

The French, whose fascination with 19th-century Japanese painting and decorative art led them to coin the term 'Japonisme,' have reciprocated the interest, and the exchange - in food, fashion and design - is ongoing. After all, these are two countries where style is considered essential to life.

Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black - and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.

A map of Trump country would look a lot like a map of the various regions and counties from which young people with the best opportunities have consistently chosen to flee.

Throughout all of life's little interruptions and distractions, I prided myself on keeping my work focused and relatively unscathed.