Release: Author and Journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams Joins the American Enterprise Institute

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Washington, DC (December 1, 2020) – Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), announced today that Thomas Chatterton Williams, noted essayist, scholar, social commentator, journalist, and author, is joining AEI as a nonresident fellow.

“We are thrilled to have Thomas Chatterton Williams joining the AEI community of scholars,” said Levin. “His powerful defenses of the free society, critiques of all forms of illiberalism, and reflections on human dignity and culture will deepen our understanding of America’s most urgent challenges in the years to come, and his sheer courage as a public voice for the American ideal of the free and open exchange of ideas is a continuing example to us all.”

Williams is the author of “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019) and “Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture” (Penguin Press, 2010). He is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, a columnist at Harper’s, and a contributing editor at The American Scholar. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde,and elsewhere, and it has been collected in “The Best American Essays.” He was one of the authors and organizers of the recent Harper’s letter, signed by many prominent public figures, in defense of free expression and in opposition to a growing climate of intolerance in leading academic, cultural, and political institutions in America and throughout the West.

At AEI, Williams will pursue his next book project — an exploration of the sources of illiberalism on the left and right — and work to build bridges among the friends of the open society across our culture and politics.

Said AEI President Robert Doar, “Williams’ vital work against the insidious growth of cancel culture and the betrayal of core liberal values on all sides of our politics could not be more urgent or essential. We are very pleased to welcome him to AEI.” 

Williams said, “I’m thrilled to join the AEI community and to find such support for what I believe is one of the most important projects of this era: to imagine and bring about a multiethnic, post-Trump future in which the center left and right find common cause in the defense of liberal values and opposition to the polarization and extremism that is plaguing the nation’s political and cultural life.”