Quotes from Thomas Chatterton Williams

I'm descended from southern slaves, and I'm descended on my mother's side from northern European Protestant immigrants.

In this post-post-racial, post-Obama era of resurgent populism and Balkanized identity politics, it really does feel as though it matters - and matters more than anything else - whether you're black or white.

The problem is, authentic hip-hop culture is street culture. And so you've got middle-class blacks really emulating the norms of the South Bronx, which is not really in their best interests.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

New York is actually a pretty safe place, and I think invoking the Bronx as a metaphor for the nightmarish urban environment is no longer spot on.

Racism is a perceptive error, and what you actually have to do is you have to get into spaces where you're meeting people and perceiving them as human beings and not as racial stereotypes and myths.

I had the benefit, I'll say it, of coming up behind my brother and seeing what he went through and just simply trying do the opposite oftentimes.

My father very early on had both short and long-term strategies in his approach to raising his children, so my father was disturbed by the extent to which I was interested in both hip-hop and sports.

It's a bad strategy to have an identity-based strategy on the left. De-emphasizing identity all-around would help our politics because we would have to pay more attention to the issues. We may have to pay more attention to class if we didn't have these self-defeating identity agendas.

Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?

Pleas for white acceptance of black humanity have a long and terrible history in America, stretching back to the first slave narratives.

It is fun, I learned, to stroll around with Spike Lee and to gauge other people's reactions. Everyone recognizes him.

Whenever I ask myself what blackness means to me, I am struck by the parallels that exist between my predicament and that of many Western Jews, who struggle with questions of assimilation at a time when marrying outside the faith is common.

I am not immune to Oprah's charms, but President Winfrey is a terrible idea.

I do not propose to solve the Israeli-Palestine conflict. But I do think the world would be a vastly safer place - and maybe a happier one, too - if more of us learned to see beyond our biases, our preferences, and became optimists capable of letting go.

Like my father, I used to believe that hard work and mastery of a standardized exam was the fairest way for students like me to compete with those who had far more resources.

Of all the things I feel, I do not feel myself to be a victim - not in any collectively accessible way.

Martha's Vineyard is a very strange place, racially speaking. Or maybe it's the way things could be if everyone had a bit more money and job security and status and could meet on equal enough footing.

Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with 'keeping it real' are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.

Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor.

At various points in my own life, I have been laughed at scathingly for calling myself black.