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.

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.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.

The history of slavery in this country has affected not only how black people see themselves, but how white people see black people as well, and the roles they're meant to play... I'm aware of it, as a person of color.

To never think about race means that it doesn't really shape your life, or more specifically, the race that you have is not a burden to you.

As much as I'd love to believe that we are 'post-racial' - an idea that really gained traction after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 - I can never escape the fact that in the world I am perceived as a 'black man' and, in certain parts of the world, as a 'black gay man.'

Until white people understand that racism is embedded in everything, including our consciousness and socialisation, then we cannot go forward.

We have to undo the millions of little white lies that America told itself and the world about the American Black man.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.

I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.

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

It's been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.

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.

I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive.

There was a while when I was feeling like, 'Damn, if I'd just been born black, I would not have to go through all this'.

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

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.

Many white Americans resist relinquishing the sense of entitlement skin color has given them throughout our national history.

White identity politics has permeated our rhetoric.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.