Words matter. These are the best Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Pleas for white acceptance of black humanity have a long and terrible history in America, stretching back to the first slave narratives.
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 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.
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 write a lot about race precisely because I don’t believe it’s real.
Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American.
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.
If the idea of separate human races is a mistake to begin with, then monoracial forms of identification are fictitious and counterproductive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mobs in the street tearing down Ulysses S. Grant statues is a really chilling sight.
Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.
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.
Jacques Audiard has always been an outlier in a French film industry that is starkly bifurcated between high and low.
Of all the things I feel, I do not feel myself to be a victim – not in any collectively accessible way.
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.
There can be no dragon slayer in the absence of dragons.
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?
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 love being a foreigner.
The name Albert Murray was never household familiar. Yet he was one of the truly original minds of 20th-century American letters.
Almost every summer, my wife and I, now with two kids in tow, spend a couple of weeks in Italy.
I’m the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South.
It is fun, I learned, to stroll around with Spike Lee and to gauge other people’s reactions. Everyone recognizes him.
I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn’t real, race isn’t real.
I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it.
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.
I consciously learned and performed my race like a teacher’s pet in an advanced placement course on black masculinity.
As fearsome as Covid-19 is, it is not the Nazis.
The ideal post-Trump politician will, at the very least, be a deeply serious figure with a strong record of public service behind her.
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.
Well, I think that hip-hop is not just a music. It’s really a culture and it’s a way of life.
As a ‘parisien d’adoption,’ I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric.
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.
I do think that some form of reparations for the descendants of American slavery would go a long way.
There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we’re really talking about is class or, more accurate still, manners, values and taste.
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.
Most so-called ‘black’ people do not feel themselves at liberty to simply turn off or ignore their allotted racial designation, whether they would like to or not.
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.
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.
Pent-up white racism did fire Mr. Trump’s candidacy, and he happily fanned the flames.
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.
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.
Throughout all of life’s little interruptions and distractions, I prided myself on keeping my work focused and relatively unscathed.
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.’
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.
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.’
