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" It is, I think, the very chaos of America that allowed me to prosper. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Me
Chaos
America
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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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Black
More
Me
" I had no expectations of white people at all. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Had
People
White
" You had eight years before President Trump, a situation where the opposition party basically ran in opposition to the president on a platform of thinly based racism. That doesn't mean that the politicians themselves were outright racist, but when charges of birtherism came up, no one repudiated it. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Situation
You
Party
" Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Beyond
Racism
Mortgage
" I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, and I would cut on the TV, and I would watch a show like 'The Wonder Years,' or I would watch, you know, some other show like 'Family Ties.' "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Home
Safety
School
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Country
Racism
Long
" Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Question
Choose
Any
" White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
White
Racial
Never
" The president of the United States is not a king. You know? Barack Obama was elected by the American people. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
King
American
People
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Live
Black
America
" African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Country
Beginning
Here
" Black people are pledging their fealty to the state, and yet they aren't getting the same return. This is theft. It's systemized. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Theft
Same
Return
" I started writing regularly for 'The Atlantic' roughly around the time that Barack Obama got inaugurated. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Writing
Started
Got
" There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Way
Policy
Understand
" I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Escape
Born
Love
" Abraham Lincoln was killed by the forces of white supremacy. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Forces
Abraham
White
" When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
You
Space
Mind
" The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Presentation
Civil
Rights
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Finding
Past
Process
" The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Violence
Relationship
People
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Open
Core
Glowing
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Me
Over
Process
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Home
Man
Identity
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
People
War
Slavery
" My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.' "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
College
Writer
Mind
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Forward
Black
You
" The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Happen
Than
Country
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
History
People
Her
" I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Just
Think
Advocate
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
War
Education
Flag