Top 88 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

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.

Donald Trump begins his political career in birtherism. That idea is connected to a very, very old notion that African-Americans are not citizens.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn’t actually come from the criminal justice system.

I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don’t want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can.

White supremacy is a very, very popular and trenchant belief in this country’s history and heritage.

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.

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.

For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.

If I could have anything – you know, and this is across the board for any presidential candidate – I would have a greater acknowledgment of history in our policy and in our affairs.

I think at places like ‘Slate’ or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position.

It is said that Obama speaks ‘professorially,’ a fact that understates the quickness and agility of his mind.

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.

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.

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.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.

When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated – and I’m talking about my childhood – with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.

Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism.

My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.

I love America the way I love my family – I was born into it. And there’s no escape out of it.

Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.

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.

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.

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.

Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we’d like to admit. That’s just how it is. I don’t despair too much about dying, either. It’s just a fact of being human.

The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in.

I have never read ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’

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.

Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing ‘mere’ about symbols.

Donald Trump did not appear by magic.

It’s very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It’s really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it’s impossible to fully see yourself.

I never expected my writing to become as popular as it did.

We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.

It’s hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true – his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.

Like a lot of people, I’m very, very concerned about Senator Clinton’s record. I’m very, very concerned about where her positions were in the 1990s, when we had some of the most disgusting legislation in terms of our criminal justice, really, in this country’s history.

One of the things that’s really, really present in ‘Between the World and Me’ is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.

I’m the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could’ve been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.

I didn’t start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.

American myths have never been colorless.

It’s kind of selfish to say that you’re only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see.

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.

There isn’t a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.

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.

I don’t attempt to make people uncomfortable; I think that my standards in terms of art and journalism always have necessitated my discomfort.

If, to the end of its existence, America harbors white supremacy, I don’t know how remarkable that would be. France has dealt with anti-Semitism since its inception.

The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too – the mind is damaged, too.

African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning.

‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.

Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. And many of those folks also, at the very least, gave land to African Americans when they were liberated.

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.

I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don’t think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don’t think it is. It’s just true.

Breitbart media is named after the same gentleman who basically framed Shirley Sherrod during the Obama administration.

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.

Obama’s presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he’d awakened about American identity.