Thomas Chatterton Williams

“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.”

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

“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.”

“When I published my first book, a memoir, the experience taught me that writing something of any significant length was an endurance sport as much as anything else.”

“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.”

“Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”