Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

The American paradigm of race requires that there be an ‘other’ - and the other is Black people. That's what makes white people, white.

The very definition of 'blackness' is as broad as that of 'whiteness,' yet we're seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.

The concept of “the white community” is a monolithic concept that I do not accept.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

America is racial. America was founded on race. Race is America. The code name for America is 'race.'

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.

If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.

Racial discourses and theories are socially constructed ... but repudiating race theory does not make it disappear in politics. Race matters ... because it functions as a marker and an anchor to establish and repudiate identity, status and position ... Races exist because racism exists.

The real unifying force in American political life is whiteness, no matter its party, gender, region or, at times, even its class.

I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you're questioning racism; you're saying racism isn't real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We'd have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.

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

White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.

This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time - that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not 'doing.'

In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be 'a black kid'. I was who I was. Which isn't to say things haven't happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't black.

Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

It's one thing when other African-Americans try to threaten my race card, but when people outside of my ethnicity have the audacity to question how 'down' I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted for me as a black woman? Unacceptable.

As a matter of fact they'd blacken us down. I guess there's a reason that according to what the Caucasian wanted us to look like. He wanted us to look-if we were Black, then he had his idea of what we look like.

People are so confused about race and hip-hop that people didn't even consider the Beastie Boys one of the greatest rap groups of all time because they were white.

We need Black supremacy to get Negroes off their knees in churches that preach a white heaven, a white God and a white universe.

We’re always talking about blacks as a group and whites as individuals.