Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse by Thomas Chatterton Williams (Review)
Reviewed by Timothy Sandefur
New York: Knopf, 2025
245 pp. $30
Thomas Chatterton Williams has recently emerged as one of the most interesting American intellectuals writing on questions of race and “identity politics.” Son of a black father and a white mother, Williams previously published Self-Portrait in Black and White (2019), in which he offered an eloquent autobiographical account of how he learned to see past the inaccurate and foolhardy black/white dichotomy in which so much American discourse about race is framed. Race, he wrote, is “not something intrinsic and immutable but something fluid, illusory, and imposed.”[1] That insight led him to reject the racialist nihilism of such pseudo-intellectuals as Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose books—especially the award-winning Between the World and Me—not only treat American race relations in stark us-versus-them terms but portray American society as fundamentally and incurably oriented around “white supremacy.” Williams discarded what he called Coates’s “nonsensical” fixation on a “permanent sense of injury” and made the case for “valoriz[ing] individuality, cultivation, and self-creation over membership in any particular lineage or clan.” [2]
But Self-Portrait came out before the catastrophic riots of 2020, which cost at least nineteen lives and perhaps $2 billion in property damage across the country. Now, in Summer of Our Discontent, he tries to make sense of the conflagrations that were only partly attributable to protests over George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. In doing so, he displays a rare and admirable objectivity. Prominent intellectuals, he observes, seem always to insist that acts of violence such as Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, should be viewed “in context”—so shouldn’t we also consider the context in which cities from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, were terrorized and burned five years ago?
To Williams, that context includes not just the society-wide frustrations stemming from the COVID-19 lockdowns and the “ludicrous and disorienting performances” of President Donald Trump but also the dismal intellectual atmosphere in which pundits, professors, and politicians have come to discuss questions of race—the atmosphere generally called “wokeism” (83). This pestilential mix of half-defined emotions and attitudes regards American society (more precisely, capitalism) as steeped in racial oppression, not because individual white people are racist but because “the system”—always vaguely defined—is inherently biased to “privilege” whites above blacks. This means that racism isn’t something a person does but part of what he is—and consequently, no degree of effort or atonement by white people can rectify “social injustice.” At the same time, this doctrine characterizes black people as inevitable victims—not of any specific wrong but of the omnipresent, all-powerful force called “whiteness.” As Williams notes, this inevitably “infantiliz[es] black people (and, as always follows, various other homogenized groups perceived to be separated from whites on the twin scales of privilege and disadvantage), [and] reinforc[es] the assumption that they are, en masse, unequal and generically aggrieved, props in the greater national psychodrama” (94).
One consequence of wokeism is that it crowds out any effort to understand, let alone combat, actual instances of racism when they occur. Like the boy who cried wolf, false or exaggerated claims of bigotry swamp instances of the real thing. Williams gives the example of actor Jussie Smollett, who in 2019 faked a “hate crime” by hiring two thugs to beat him up so he could claim white people had attacked him. His false allegations were immediately endorsed by sympathetic celebrities from singer Katy Perry to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, none of whom showed even an instant’s skepticism despite the fact that “hate crime” hoaxes have become commonplace in modern America. “The inevitable effect,” writes Wiliams, was to sacrifice the “moral authority and credibility” necessary to combat true instances of race-motivated crime (65–66).
Meanwhile, demagogues such as Coates and the authors of the New York Times’s “1619 Project” doubled down on the notion that the United States is so “structurally racist” that even good moral habits are proof of racial oppression. In the summer of 2020, the Smithsonian—a monument of unaging intellect if there ever was one—published an online graphic asserting “that rational thought, politeness, objectivity, and the Protestant work ethic” were “harmful ‘white’ characteristics that perpetuate systemic racism” (99). Two years later, the Gates Foundation released a report about mathematics education that claimed “that a ‘focus on getting the right answer’ [or] requiring students to ‘show their work’ . . . were also facets of ‘white supremacy culture’” (99). Incidents such as these surely desensitized many Americans to the accusation of racism.
That worsened when the riots broke out only to be met by racist commentators who sought to rationalize the violence—at least, when committed by people they deemed “nonwhite.” Prominent journalists and community leaders downplayed or even excused the arson, burglary, and assaults committed by hooligans from Wisconsin to Texas or portrayed these as mere aberrations, thereby generating the cynical slogan that Williams uses as the title of one of his chapters: “fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”
It’s understandable that idealistic people who just wanted to demonstrate against police brutality might be embarrassed by criminals taking advantage of protests to engage in lawlessness. But efforts to justify or even conceal their acts were not only dishonest but counterproductive. After all, Williams notes, the primary victims of such violence were black people themselves. When protestors and politicians began embracing the notion of literally abolishing—or at least severely restricting—police departments, the consequences were predictable: “by November of that same year, The Washington Post reported that homicides in Minneapolis had skyrocketed 50 percent. . . . More than five hundred people had been shot” (105).
Some media figures even cheered on the rioters. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times writer in charge of the 1619 Project, even said it would be “an honor” if the rampages were called “The 1619 Riots.”[3] Yet at the same time, prominent acts of violence committed by white people were treated as inexcusable atrocities. The most notable of these was that of seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who traveled to violence-ravaged Kenosha, Wisconsin, with a rifle and medical supplies as part of what he—perhaps foolishly—regarded as an effort to keep the peace. Eventually he was attacked by three men whom he shot in self-defense. Two died. Although none of these men were black, Rittenhouse was treated in the months that followed as if he were a white supremacist. “In the context of the summer of 2020,” Williams writes, “what had happened among four white men could never be understood as unfortunate or tragic or even simply illegal; it was necessary to interpret it as fundamentally racist” (155).
None of this excuses the wrongdoing of police officers, in Kenosha and elsewhere, who in many instances committed unjustifiable acts of violence against truly peaceful protestors or who simply refused to do their jobs. Video from Kenosha, for example, revealed that officers took few steps to restore order but instead supported self-proclaimed armed peacekeepers such as Rittenhouse. “The real scandal,” Williams observes, “is that they . . . outsourced the task of [policing] . . . to improvising adolescents. These police [became] spectators, watching a seventeen-year-old attempt to save them” (153).
Nor is this to ignore the fact that actual, old-fashioned white bigotry was on display in some communities, and that prominent figures, including the president, failed to take the steps necessary to make clear how unacceptable this was. When white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, President Trump issued a statement infamously saying that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the ensuing confrontation (209). Williams calls these remarks “somewhere between ambiguous and unconvincing”—and yet even here, the facts were more complicated than many in the political world were willing to admit (209). Trump’s actual point was that those who came to Charlottesville to express opposition to the white nationalist marchers had committed violent acts, and that these went unreported, or underreported, in the media.
That was true. Although that in no way excuses the crime of James Fields—one of the white supremacists who drove his car into a crowd of protestors, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer—failing to report it fed the resentment of a vocal group of white Americans who saw themselves as persecuted due to their race. Indeed, it lent that resentment undeserved legitimacy. That, in turn, fostered the sense of bitter entitlement that exploded on January 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump’s admirers stormed the U.S. Capitol intending to disrupt the counting of votes and lynch the vice president of the United States.[4]
Williams relates all of this with exceptional candor and rightly concludes that at the bottom of this poisonous well is the corrupting idea of race—more specifically, the pernicious falsehood that what matters about a person is his biological ancestry rather than his thoughts. This corruption has seeped into the intellectual “mainstream” via writers such as Coates and Hannah-Jones and many Republicans. In short, writes Williams, “it is the cynics alone who have taken narrative, imaginative, and therefore philosophical and political control” (35). Relentless propaganda from the country’s most celebrated writers and commentators has taught an entire generation, white as well as black, that America is not for them—leading to what Williams calls “the existential wound of non-meaning in a society that is frankly more democratic, multiethnic, and egalitarian than any other in recorded history” (147).
Yet even as Williams paints this distressing portrait unflinchingly, he undercuts himself when he moves on to diagnosis. As the subtitle of his book suggests, he lays much of the blame on what he calls “moral clarity,” which he says “sounds enticing” but causes people to become “logically blinded” (132). As he sees it, the violence of 2020 and the rotting of American institutions is due to the fact that this “clarity” has crowded out “institutional neutrality and viewpoint diversity” in the media and academic worlds (229).
But certainty isn’t the problem—it’s what one’s certain about. The problem isn’t that the “woke” are “morally clear.” It’s that they’re clearly wrong, and that those in positions of responsibility, who ought to be absolutely clear about the unacceptability of violence and the precious value of individual rights, haven’t been. One might add that Williams’s own chief virtues as a writer are his principled individualism and his refusal to equivocate even when that might make it easier to win applause. That’s the kind of clarity we could use more of.
Williams implicitly recognizes this in his afterword, in which he expresses the horror so many of us felt at the way prominent intellectuals celebrated Hamas’s attacks on Israel in October 2023. He writes with justified indignation about the pro-terrorist protests that sprang up on campuses nationwide and the professors who, after loudly proclaiming that “black lives matter,” were perfectly happy to say that Jewish lives don’t. This, he writes, marked “a strange echo of Trumpian reasoning . . . amount[ing] to a version of there’s violence on many sides” (223). In other words, moral un-clarity is no virtue. It is, in fact, key to evil’s survival.
More disappointing is Williams’s failure to finger the real cause of all the social ills he describes: the philosophy of egalitarianism. This foolish conception of justice, most effectively espoused by philosopher John Rawls, holds that inequality is synonymous with injustice; consequently, even purely voluntary transactions that result in disparate outcomes are a kind of harm for which the better-off must make amends. Moreover, in the Rawlsian vision, all individual rights—not just property but even free speech—are resources society owns and distributes to individuals by collective decision. This explains the jargon of “privilege”—the “system” supposedly has “chosen” to “give” some people more than others, which must be rectified so all come out equal. These false premises underlie the idea that gaps in income, social status, or even individual talent offend “social justice”; that society is oppressive unless it redistributes these things according to “equity.” The reality, however, is that inequality isn’t injustice at all, and the state’s proper role isn’t to engineer equal outcomes. It is to secure individual rights. That alone can make for a safe, just, and (yes) more diverse society.
Williams is surely right that “genuine liberals, as well as their moderate and center-right partners, have no choice but to reclaim the abandoned moral high ground” (240). And he has done a great service in clearing many of the obstacles to that ground. But it can only be reclaimed if we are clear about a morality rooted in reason, individualism, and the politics of liberty.
[1] Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Overcoming Race (New York: Norton, 2019), 63.
[2] Williams, Self-Portrait, 124, 5.
[3] Victor Morton, “Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times 1619 Project Leader, Cheers Riots, Statue Attacks,” Washington Times, June 20, 2020, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/20/nikole-hannah-jones-new-york-times-1619-project-le/.
[4] “Rioters Chant ‘Hang Mike Pence’ on Jan. 6, 2021,” Washington Post, June 16, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/rioters-chant-hang-mike-pence-on-jan-6-2021/2022/06/16/3cc093f1-0eb7-427d-8073-b5874ca27e80_video.html.