Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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Donald Trump did not appear by magic.
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It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.
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I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.
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Abraham Lincoln was killed by the forces of white supremacy.
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Kaepernick's protest has been very successful. I really appreciate the fact that he's been giving away money to organisations; he pledged to give away a million dollars, and he's been doing it.
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The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine.
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I write what I write in the way that I write it. I'm not being abstract, you know. I'm talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life.
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The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited.
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It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.
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The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.
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In Richard Wright, Dad found a literature of himself. He'd read Manchild in the Promised Land and Another Country, but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain.
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Like a lot of people, I'm very, very concerned about Senator Clinton's record. I'm very, very concerned about where her positions were in the 1990s, when we had some of the most disgusting legislation in terms of our criminal justice, really, in this country's history.
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In comics, you have to imagine what happens. I really loved it; I loved collecting. I loved following the adventures and figuring out what was going to happen next. I was a huge X-Men fan; I was a huge Spider-Man fan, and, to large degree, I remain one. It's literature for me; it's art.
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I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.
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I've seen, and liked, 'Insecure' and 'Atlanta.'
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Fighting, I guess, was never the real reason I read comic books as a kid. The fighting was an important part, an integral part of it; I don't know I would've read it without it.
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Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. And many of those folks also, at the very least, gave land to African Americans when they were liberated.
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I never expected my writing to become as popular as it did.
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The president of the United States is not a king. You know? Barack Obama was elected by the American people.
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If I could have anything - you know, and this is across the board for any presidential candidate - I would have a greater acknowledgment of history in our policy and in our affairs.
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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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It is, I think, the very chaos of America that allowed me to prosper.
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Life is always a problem. The fact that I'm on the radio saying that I don't necessarily see hope does not relieve people, does not relieve my son, does not relieve children, of the responsibility to struggle.