Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

Obviously, race is the elephant in the room, and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it's not going to get better... people have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we're comfortable. We still have no clue what being born white means.

Too often when we talk about racial or economic justice, we white people do not see ourselves in the picture. We feel like it's all well and good for other people to do better, but not at our expense, and it won't benefit us.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

Nobody black had learned anything from the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.

There's sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk's burden. Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.

Just because a black man is running the RNC doesn't mean black folks are going to, 'Oh, OK, I will be a Republican.' Just as with the election of President Obama. All the problems and concerns that are very important to African Americans don't get solved overnight.

People have got to get together and work together. I'm tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict.

I think black Americans expect too much from individual black Americans in terms of changing the status quo.

The effort we make in trying to get white people to let us alone or invest in us is looking pretty futile…. I am a reluctant separatist

The interests of the white working class have often been used by white political elites to stave off challenges to inequality and discrimination by black folk and other minority groups.

There's a long tradition of black folks pleading with white people. It's a tradition that emerges from political necessity, so I get it; I'm just not very interested in it.

One of the most important misunderstandings for white people to get over to move forward is this idea that racism is a good-bad proposition - that if we're good we can't be part of it, that being uncomfortable means you're a terrible person. We have to let go of that and understand it as a system we all live in.

It isn't only Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trump's shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety - despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.

A fundamental but very challenging part of my work is moving white people from an individual understanding of racism - i.e. only some people are racist and those people are bad - to a structural understanding.

Anyone who understands anti-racist work, a white person specifically, understands that it is not black people's responsibility, or any person of color's responsibility, to dismantle the structures that keep white people in positions of power. We do our job to thrive, to survive. To protect ourselves, to sit together and feel better and to heal.

I think people are uncomfortable talking about the racist history of this country and what we need to do to undo the impact of racism.

I think it's extremely important to challenge white brothers and sisters and think more systematically and strategically about the whiteness that they possess.

You can be poor, middle class, or rich - it doesn't matter. The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you've never been oppressed. Flash the black card, and most white people will cower.

I want the United States to be having a much larger and more public conversation about racist capitalism. We need a radical reimagining of the economy in this country.

Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general.

I'm not one to spend my life asking the question, 'Is there racism in America?' Certainly there is. But I want to do something about it.

The Democratic Media Complex, in its pursuit of Orwellian hate-crime legislation, reparations, and sundry non-ameliorative resolutions to America's troubled racial past, pursues its victims with blood lust.

We have a responsibility to do better as black people in this country. I don't care how white people look at you - I care that we have a one-trillion-dollar spending base, and if you want to see change, you have to start to focus on, economically, how can we change our communities.

Black people have been marginalized and kept away from the economics of this country. I think people are starting to understand that and are trying to figure out how we can change that and allow everybody to join in this game of capitalism.

White people who voted for Trump decided to invest in a president who underwrites white supremacy in the guise of populism.