During Black History Month we are recognizing those individuals and organizations with Fanwood roots or in the Fanwood-Scotch Plains community who are or have made a difference. This week we are recognizing Thomas Chatterton Williams, an author and staff writer at The Atlantic. Raised in Fanwood, he is a visiting professor of humanities at Bard College, and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Williams received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and his master’s from New York University.
Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the board of trustees. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Le Monde, and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. His next book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, will be published by Knopf in August.
Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. 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.
Losing My Cool portrays the allure and danger of hip-hop culture with the authority of a true fan who’s lived through it all, while demonstrating the saving grace of literature and the power of the bond between father and son.
In Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse Williams takes aim at the ideology of critical race theory, the rise of an oppressive social media, the fall from President Obama to President Trump, and the twinned crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd. Williams documents the extent to which this transition has altered media, artistic creativity, education, employment, policing, and, most profoundly, the ambient language and culture we use to make sense of our lives.
