Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

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  • 96 quotes

Thomas Chatterton Williams, is quoted 96 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Racial, Love Being I Love, Foreigner and Absence.

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I love being a foreigner.

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

I'm the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South.

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

I am not immune to Oprah's charms, but President Winfrey is a terrible idea.

Mobs in the street tearing down Ulysses S. Grant statues is a really chilling sight.

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

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

At various points in my own life, I have been laughed at scathingly for calling myself black.

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

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

Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American.

I do think that some form of reparations for the descendants of American slavery would go a long way.

Of all the things I feel, I do not feel myself to be a victim - not in any collectively accessible way.

The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.

I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it.

My father 'Pappy' who is black, is from Galveston and Fort Worth, Texas. My mother, who is white, is from San Diego.

Being fired for bad performance or for having an alter ego that posts incredibly racist stuff is not cancel culture.

Jacques Audiard has always been an outlier in a French film industry that is starkly bifurcated between high and low.

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

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

Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair.

I'm descended from southern slaves, and I'm descended on my mother's side from northern European Protestant immigrants.

As a 'parisien d'adoption,' I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric.

We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.

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

A powerful way to sidestep America's reluctance to become postracial would be for more black Americans to become postnational.

I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.

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

Throughout all of life's little interruptions and distractions, I prided myself on keeping my work focused and relatively unscathed.

The ideal post-Trump politician will, at the very least, be a deeply serious figure with a strong record of public service behind her.

Pleas for white acceptance of black humanity have a long and terrible history in America, stretching back to the first slave narratives.

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

When I was in college, the Roots, the sui generis ensemble from Philadelphia encompassing all manner of black music, played a show on campus.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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