Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Typically, there's this perspective among writers - and black writers: there's this idea that there is one person - and maybe beyond writers - among blacks, there is always one person who everyone should go to learn about all things black.
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It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.
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From last century's 'The Birth of a Nation' to this century's 'Gods and Generals,' Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War and, thus, modern America's very origins.
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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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There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that.
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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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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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Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book.
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My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.
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In the 1930s and the 1940s, we set up the FHA. We set up the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. We set up specific bureaus to make our communities look the way they look.
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[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.
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The thing people have to remember is there's nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this historically. We can look at 1619, when Africans first came here, and how early African slaves intermixed pretty indiscriminately with indentured white servants.
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The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that.
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When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.
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The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in.
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Mr. Clyde Ross at that time, like most African Americans around the country, was unable to secure a loan, due to policies around redlining and deciding, you know, who deserved the loans and who doesn’t. There was a broad, broad consensus that African Americans, for no other reason besides blanket racism, could not be responsible homeowners.
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I think 'Dear White People,' the show, is a tremendous artistic achievement. It's always hinting that there is something beyond the pleading and wokeness, something that the show's more militant characters can't see.
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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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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 was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree.
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When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.
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James Baldwin is probably the biggest influence on me from a literary perspective.
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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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My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK.