98 Quotes by Thomas Chatterton Williams

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.'

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 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.

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.