Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes
I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I've never felt safer or less harassed anywhere.
Williams, Thomas Chatterton. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
See {623774} for a poem he wrote in Arabic about the battle itself. He had written books in Arabic about Hebrew grammar and language and was the first person to use the Arabic poetic style with its meter and rhyming and used it for writing Hebrew poetry. This poem was so written.
Lame was not opposed to civil rights as some who read this quotation sometimes conclude. He did think that much of the lack of success of minorities in America could be ameliorated by many self-improvement and individual efforts. His reference to destroying America, was an interesting rhetorical technique of assuming that what you advocate is not implemented and showing that it leads to disaster. Phrased this way, it gets and focuses the attention of an audience.
Warren a Republican from California who knew Palmer for years, stood up, put his arm around Palmer and told him, “Kyle, you and I will always be friends” and walked out.
Russia at the time would not allow Jews to leave the country under the theory that The Soviet Union had paid to educate them and their skills were too valuable to allow them to emigrate to other nations without some compensation for Russia. Meanwhile there was immense pent up pressure for Jews to immigrate to the U. S., Israel, Europe, even parts of South America and Asia. Russia finally changed their policies and millions of Jews and non-Jews emigrated.
She was a brilliant woman who was well ahead of her time in many respects. But her rigid adherence to socialism and communism distorted her view of a number of things. This was one. Pogroms were occasions where the Czarist Russian Cossacks or other gangs of hooligans were “allowed” and often encouraged to attack Jewish farms, villages and stores. They looted the property, raped and murdered many of the people, and often ethnically cleansed areas. Rosa was thrilled by the Russian Revolution and assumed that something as uncivilized as Pogroms and anti-Semitism would never take place in the coming communist society of Russia. As a German Jew, although there was a terrible history from the Dark and Middle Ages of German Pogroms and ant-Semitism, Germany of 1917 was too civilized and modern to ever have attacks on Jews. She completely underestimated what the politicians of Russia and Germany would do to control their societies and pander to some while scapegoating and murdering Jews and other minorities. She herself was murdered by a German fascist anti-Semite 2 years after this statement.
At this point, the horrors of the German concentration death camps were generally known by the world press. This quotation shows the denial that the Irish Free State was in about the German Nazi atrocities. The 6-county Nationalsits were the Irish counties in Northern Ireland that did not join the Irish Free State and so far as the Catholic Irish were concerned, the Catholics of Northern Ireland were a persecuted minority undergoing oppression and that was not they believed morally different from the murders of millions of Jews, Gypsies and handicapped people in Europe. If the Free State Irish publicly admitted the difference, they would morally have had to join the allies and De Valera was totally opposed to that. Over 70,000 Irishmen and women rejected the moral stand of their government, and volunteered for the British Army to the great distress of the Free State leaders like De Valera. See {639722} for his personal denial of reality.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (born 1981) is an American cultural critic and author. He is the author of the 2019 book Self-Portrait in Black and White and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.
