98 Quotes by Thomas Chatterton Williams

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

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

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.'

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.

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

Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with 'keeping it real' are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.

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

Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.

The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.