98 Quotes by Thomas Chatterton Williams

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 think I was drawn to black culture by the same things that have been drawing the entire world to it since the days of Richard Wright, Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. This culture is original, potent and seductive.