Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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If you are attempting to study American history, and you don't understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America.
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There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy.
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As a writer, I was shaped by a desire to write for black people. That things were not being represented. That was my motivating force. That it has become what it has become is shocking to me. I just wanted to be able to take care of my kids.
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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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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 had no expectations of white people at all.
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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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Racism is a physical experience.
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My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.
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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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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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Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because ... America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist.
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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 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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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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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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The FHA literally drew up the redlining map and then basically distributed - I'm sorry, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation actually did it, and then distributed to banks who used that as policy to determine how they would lend and who they would lend to. The racism in the system was pervasive and total.
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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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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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If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.
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People sort of went crazy when 'BTWAM' came out. I'm happy a bunch of people read it. I'm happy it touched so many people. I'm less happy that it became an object for certain folks or was discussed that way. I'm less happy that journalists started scrolling through my kid's Instagram account.
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The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history. Much of that violence, at least to some extent, you know, done by the very state that's supposed to protect them.
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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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I started writing regularly for 'The Atlantic' roughly around the time that Barack Obama got inaugurated.