Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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It is said that Obama speaks 'professorially,' a fact that understates the quickness and agility of his mind.
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I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate.
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'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.
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You don't make a case for reparations thinking, 'Oh yeah, people are gonna love this.' I didn't see that coming.
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If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation.
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The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.
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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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White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers.
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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery.
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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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Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book.
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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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The process of getting conscious, for me, was a very, very uncomfortable, disturbing, and sometimes physically painful process. And so that's the standard to which I write, because it was what I've experienced over my time.
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Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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The Ku Klux Klan is the most profligate domestic terrorist organization in this country's history.
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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.