Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes
I write a lot about race precisely because I don't believe it's real.
Williams, Thomas Chatterton. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
After Lyndon Johnson led the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Republican’s reached out to the Southern Racists who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party, and their Southern Strategy succeeded so that the overt racists of the nation became Republicans instead of Democrats. At the same time, liberal Republicans felt estranged from the “party of Lincoln” and over the years the Republicans drive out the liberals and then the moderates. The racists and white Supremacists became more and more influential in setting the policies, norms and language of the party and soon White identity code phrases became part of much of the Republican rhetoric. This offended liberals, and Blacks. The Republican rhetoric became more and more extreme in order to get enough votes from white males and some whit females while that demographic was shrinking as a percentage of the U. S. population. Roy felt that this made for an enthusiastic and rabid base, but the Republicans could no longer produce a majority coalition, and had one victory of the presidency with only George W. Bush who actually last the popular vote but won in the Electoral College.
Quoted in the Court’s notes of the meeting
At the time Thomas was the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In an informal discussion among some of the staff, a white employee was describing the difficulty he had encountered trying to get a bank loan. This quotation illustrates that Thomas has had an antipathy to affirmative action and racial programming or preferences well before he was appointed to the Appellate and later the Supreme Court.
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.
