98 Quotes by Thomas Chatterton Williams

The problem of racial difference in America - and in modern life more broadly - is always presented as an economic, political, biological or cultural problem. But I want to say that it's at least as much a philosophical and imaginative disaster.

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.'

People will always look different from each other in ways we can't control. What we can control is what we allow ourselves to make of those differences.

What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's web of problems called race, its received and dangerous habits of thinking about and organizing people along a binary of white and black, free and unfree, even once I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.

If the idea of separate human races is a mistake to begin with, then monoracial forms of identification are fictitious and counterproductive.

A fatherless boy raised in Jim Crow Texas, my dad was a tenacious autodidact, the first in his family to get a college degree.

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

Intellectual development was paramount to my father, of course, but he was hardly a geek. He was a man who happened to be of a certain Southern culture and a certain age, and his talents and tastes had been molded accordingly.

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.