Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.
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Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount.
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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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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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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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It is said that Obama speaks 'professorially,' a fact that understates the quickness and agility of his mind.
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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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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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When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.
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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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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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Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book.
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You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery.
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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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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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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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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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The Ku Klux Klan is the most profligate domestic terrorist organization in this country's history.
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James Baldwin is probably the biggest influence on me from a literary perspective.
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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.