Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.
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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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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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When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything.
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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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For me, my writing benefits from my experience.
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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 relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.
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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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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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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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People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time.
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I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent.
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Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.
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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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If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works.
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There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.
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I was 24 when Samori was born. His mom was 23.
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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.
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Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols.
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I don't attempt to make people uncomfortable; I think that my standards in terms of art and journalism always have necessitated my discomfort.