Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.
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It is, I think, the very chaos of America that allowed me to prosper.
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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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Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that's a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time.
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Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country.
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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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It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself.
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Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism.
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To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.
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In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.
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I wouldn't argue that Mitt Romney is a white supremacist.
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[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn't directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
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We look at young black kids with a scowl on their face, walking a certain way down the block with their sweatpants dangling, however, with their hoodies on. And folks think that this is a show of power or a show of force. But I know, because I've been among those kids, it ultimately is fear.
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I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me – but the process of actually crafting it is essential.
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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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I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake.
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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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I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.
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I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don't want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can.
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When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.
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Throughout his eight years in office, Barack Obama endured a campaign of illegitimacy waged either by pluralities or majorities of the Republican party. Donald Trump rooted his candidacy in that campaign. It's fairly obvious.
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You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less.
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I think human societies tend to be problematic.
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You had eight years before President Trump, a situation where the opposition party basically ran in opposition to the president on a platform of thinly based racism. That doesn't mean that the politicians themselves were outright racist, but when charges of birtherism came up, no one repudiated it.