Thomas Chatterton Williams

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”