Thomas Chatterton Williams – författare

The Sunday Times Bestseller''Provides a way of understanding what happened to us that preserves the humanity of all parties and points the way forward toward renewal'' Jonathan Haidt ''Makes moral and cultural sense of a profoundly perplexing time... This is an essential book'' Yuval LevinPainting a clear and detailed picture of the ideas and events that have paved the way for the dramatic paradigm shift in social justice that has taken place over the past few years, Thomas Chatterton Williams provides an incisive, culturally observant analysis of the evolving mores, manners and taboos of social justice orthodoxy.Exploring what has shaped the ways we think about diversity and freedom of expression, Williams unravels the ideology of critical race theory. Examining the rise of an oppressive social media, the fall from Obama to Trump and the twinned crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, he documents the extent to which these events have altered the ambient language and culture we use to make sense of our daily lives.Showing how liberalism - the very foundation of an open and vibrant society - is experiencing an existential crisis, under assault from the right and the left, this is an essential and compelling examination of our place in a radically changing world.

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A TIME ''MUST-READ'' ''An extraordinarily thought-provoking memoir that makes a controversial contribution to the fraught debate on race and racism . . . intellectually stimulating and compelling'' SUNDAY TIMESA reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family''s multi-generational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a ''black'' father from the segregated South and a ''white'' mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of ''black blood'' makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he''d never rigorously reflected on its foundations - but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions.It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his daughter is white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them - or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.