“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.”

American cultural critic and writer

Thomas Chatterton Williams is an American cultural critic and writer. He is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, published in 2019, and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His work also includes writing for The New York Times Magazine and serving as an Easy Chair columnist for Harper's Magazine. He is a visiting professor of the humanities and a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022.