Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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One can say Senator Sanders should have more explicit antiracist policy within his racial justice platform, not just more general stuff, and still cast a vote for Senator Sanders and still feel that Senator Sanders is the best option that we have in the race.
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I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
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I started writing regularly for 'The Atlantic' roughly around the time that Barack Obama got inaugurated.
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I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened.
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It's kind of selfish to say that you're only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see.
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I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, and I would cut on the TV, and I would watch a show like 'The Wonder Years,' or I would watch, you know, some other show like 'Family Ties.'
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I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don't think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don't think it is. It's just true.
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African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning.
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If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.
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When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.
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When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what.
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You don't actually have control of the position people want you to be in. If they say, 'You king of the blacks,' you're king of the blacks - whether you like it or not.
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You can't tolerate anybody attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with force.
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One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.
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When you know that people know who you are, you are always working - and not the work you want to do. You are sort of performing, because you know they are looking - or at least glancing - at you.
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The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.
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The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.
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I think Barack Obama was born into a home not just to a white woman and white grandparents, but a white woman and white grandparents who shockingly told him it was okay that he was black and that he should not be ashamed of it and that he should, in fact, be proud of it.
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Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.
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Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we'd like to admit. That's just how it is. I don't despair too much about dying, either. It's just a fact of being human.
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There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
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We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
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I don't want them to read what I'm writing and say, 'I think that's right,' and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it.