Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.
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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 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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Black people are pledging their fealty to the state, and yet they aren't getting the same return. This is theft. It's systemized.
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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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Every writer dreams of having the ability to hold forth for 8,000 words and pull all these different forms together: history, reportage, journalism. That was all I really wanted, and 'The Atlantic' was my first high-profile opportunity.
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I don't completely understand why people in Aspen want to hear what I have to say.
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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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I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.
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I think human societies tend to be problematic.
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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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Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows - and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere.
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One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.
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We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.
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Amiri Baraka went to Howard. Lucille Clifton went to Howard. Ossie Davis went to Howard. And I was aware of that when I was there. Charles Drew went to Howard. Thurgood Marshall went to the law school. Being aware of that and having all of that brought to bear, again, it's one of those things that I can't really separate from my career as a writer.
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I get really, really concerned when I see somebody, taking $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, will not release what they're actually saying. That's concerning.
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In the mid-90s The older gods were falling off. EPMD were breaking. Chuck and Flav had taken us as far as they could, and already the new voices were being hijacked by the death cults. Brothers who last week were shouting out Malcolm were flipped into studio gangsters, killing every nigger in sight.
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I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.
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My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.
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I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad.
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Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose.
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There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.
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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate.