Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

When I was in college, the Roots, the sui generis ensemble from Philadelphia encompassing all manner of black music, played a show on campus.

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.

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.

There can be no dragon slayer in the absence of dragons.

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

We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the Internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's 'Aleph.'

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

I love being a foreigner.

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.

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.

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.

The problem is, authentic hip-hop culture is street culture. And so you've got middle-class blacks really emulating the norms of the South Bronx, which is not really in their best interests.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black - and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.

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

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

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.

I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

It is mind-blowing to pause and think that a film as forward-facing and potent as 'Do the Right Thing' was released the same year as 'Driving Ms. Daisy.'

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.

I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day. I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.

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

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.

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.

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.

Of all the things I feel, I do not feel myself to be a victim - not in any collectively accessible way.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Martha's Vineyard is a very strange place, racially speaking. Or maybe it's the way things could be if everyone had a bit more money and job security and status and could meet on equal enough footing.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

If liberals no longer pride themselves on being the adults in the room, the bulwark against the whims of the mob, our national descent into chaos will be complete.

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

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

If the first year of the Trump administration has made anything clear, it's that experience, knowledge, education and political wisdom matter tremendously. Governing is something else entirely from campaigning. And perhaps, most important, celebrities do not make excellent heads of state.

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

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