Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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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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You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do.
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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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The president of the United States is not a king. You know? Barack Obama was elected by the American people.
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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.
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The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine.
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In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.
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Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church.
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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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Donald Trump did not appear by magic.
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I've seen, and liked, 'Insecure' and 'Atlanta.'
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I think human societies tend to be problematic.
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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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I wouldn't argue that Mitt Romney is a white supremacist.
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I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed.
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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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Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism.
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I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.
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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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The only people who usually have input on my writing are my wife and my editor. I'm not in conversation with anyone except the people I report on and the people I work with.
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My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission.
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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.