After a week's break from Second Self, we are back for episode four with writer and public intellectual Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas is the author of Self Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, and Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd. He is also a columnist at Harper's and a Contributing Writer at The New York Times Magazine. We discuss Thomas' re-evaluation of his own racial identity and race as a form of collective identity, defying incentives to conform in order to live authentically as an individual, the truly strange cultural moment in which we find ourselves, and the influence of philosophy on his work and ideas.

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