Thomas Chatterton Williams

“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.”

“We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

“People will always look different from each other in ways we can't control. What we can control is what we allow ourselves to make of those differences.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Between my freshman and senior years of high school in the late '90s, my father spent his evenings, weekends and vacations drilling my best friend and me for our SATs.”

“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.”