Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country.
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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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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.
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I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.'
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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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As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children's lifetime or even in their grandchildren's lifetime. So fatalism isn't really an option.
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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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The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine.
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I wouldn't argue that Mitt Romney is a white supremacist.
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In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.
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I think human societies tend to be problematic.
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Donald Trump did not appear by magic.
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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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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've seen, and liked, 'Insecure' and 'Atlanta.'
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I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.
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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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White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers.
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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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I love living around black people. Home is home. We suffer under racism and the physical deprivations that come with that, but beneath that, we form cultures and traditions that are beautiful.
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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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We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.