Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

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

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

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

I never though much about race.

Race is used, by all of us, in the most manipulative ways, is often force-fit and reduced to something it isn't, to something that gives us a sense of comfort, a false one. Many of us thought - needed to feel - the whole business was 'settled.' But it's not, never has been. Laws have only taken us so far.

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

I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don't want it to be.

Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.

I think that, in America, even though race is a social construct, I mean, we say this in theory, but I think a lot of people don't believe that it really is. And so it's still a very racialized society.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

Well who's black and what is a black person?

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.

Every single thing in my life is built around race.

Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.

I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

I am definitely a person of color.

When people saw that the film was called 'White People,' many got very defensive. I've been getting some very interesting emails - and I'm used to hate mail, believe me. I think this idea that we grouped white people together is offensive to people.

Race, to me, is a very blurry thing.

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

A race-transcendent politics is most likely to succeed when the white community takes responsibility for overcoming its racism, not when the black community decides to forget it.

Race has become an increasingly obsolete way of constructing community because it is based on unchangeable, immutable biological facts in a pseudo-scientific way.

If you’re talking about American history, you’re talking about race.