Thomas Chatterton Williams

“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.”

“I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I've never felt safer or less harassed anywhere.”

“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.”

“I'm the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South.”

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

“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.”

“Well, I think that hip-hop is not just a music. It's really a culture and it's a way of life.”

“I have spent my whole life earnestly believing the fundamental American dictum that a single 'drop of black blood' makes a person 'black' primarily because they can never be 'white.'”

“I believe that a lot of minority writers stress about whether they get pigeonholed in writing about identity stuff, like you can't write about other things.”

“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.”

“A fatherless boy raised in Jim Crow Texas, my dad was a tenacious autodidact, the first in his family to get a college degree.”

“Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair.”

“I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it.”

“The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.”

“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.”

“I love being a foreigner.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”