Quotes from Thomas Chatterton Williams

The name Albert Murray was never household familiar. Yet he was one of the truly original minds of 20th-century American letters.

What has changed immensely in America since 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, is the relentless demonization of nonwhite immigrants, economic migrants and asylum seekers from the highest levels of institutional authority.

A powerful way to sidestep America's reluctance to become postracial would be for more black Americans to become postnational.

We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the Internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's 'Aleph.'

I do think that some form of reparations for the descendants of American slavery would go a long way.

I think I was drawn to black culture by the same things that have been drawing the entire world to it since the days of Richard Wright, Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. This culture is original, potent and seductive.

BET was a touchstone for me and a lot of my friends - it was a place you could go to see exactly what being black in 1992 and 1996 was like and what it was supposed to look like.

Almost every summer, my wife and I, now with two kids in tow, spend a couple of weeks in Italy.

The truth is that ideas matter... If we really want to repair what is wrong in our society, it is going to require not just new policies or even new behaviors, but nothing less heroic than new ideas.

For me, what disturbs me about some of the conversations on the left is that you get the impression that times are so divisive, that there's so much discomfort with what Trump has exposed, that some people on the left don't actually have the goal of a kind of racially transcendent future. They don't want that.

Jacques Audiard has always been an outlier in a French film industry that is starkly bifurcated between high and low.

A couple of years ago, leaving a restaurant near the Louvre, I held the door for a black man in a camel overcoat. Only as he passed did I realize it was the rapper Kanye West.

Years ago, I worked briefly as a consultant for Sciences-Po, one of Paris's famed grandes ecoles, encouraging American high school students and their parents to pursue an English-language education abroad.

Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American.

If the first year of the Trump administration has made anything clear, it's that experience, knowledge, education and political wisdom matter tremendously. Governing is something else entirely from campaigning. And perhaps, most important, celebrities do not make excellent heads of state.

There can be no dragon slayer in the absence of dragons.

The United States was founded on the triple sin of slavery, genocide, and land theft.

Most so-called 'black' people do not feel themselves at liberty to simply turn off or ignore their allotted racial designation, whether they would like to or not.

As a 'parisien d'adoption,' I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric.

I've been socially deemed black in America, and this is a category that's been hurting my family for generations and that has also led to extraordinary cultural contributions that I'm very proud of, but it's not a real category and our society is damaged by insisting on it.

Yet exactly what constitutes privilege and disadvantage can be counterintuitive: There is no metric to take into account the casual racism that I had to navigate in my neighborhood, a difficulty I was keenly aware friends of mine on the more socially cohesive and nurturing black side of town were often able to avoid.

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

In 'Losing My Cool,' I argue repeatedly that it is a terrible lie, which has been foisted on us and sold to us for decades now, that hip-hop culture equals black culture, that being authentically black means keeping it real.

There were books all over the house, and I was always told that I could write and that it was something good to do. So when I finally did it, it wasn't so strange or bizarre.