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Guest Essay

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Mr. Williams is the author of the forthcoming “Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.”

In the spring of 2023, in a cramped classroom in the Hudson Valley, I taught an undergraduate seminar on the courage to think about race in unconventional ways. It revolved around reading books by Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson and Albert Murray. These minds had shaped and refined my thinking about the idea of America, the fundamentally mongrel populations that inhabit it, as well as the yet-to-be-perfected flesh-and-blood nation of the future we might........

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