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" I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me - but the process of actually crafting it is essential. "

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" There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

History

I Am

Identity

" There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos. "

" If your response to the first black president is to say they weren't born in this country... you might be a white supremacist. "

" My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission. "

" The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Black people are pledging their fealty to the state, and yet they aren't getting the same return. This is theft. It's systemized. "

" 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. "

" If you are attempting to study American history, and you don't understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America. "

" 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. "

" I started writing regularly for 'The Atlantic' roughly around the time that Barack Obama got inaugurated. "

" I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book. "

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tradition

Present

" Donald Trump did not appear by magic. "

" We look at young black kids with a scowl on their face, walking a certain way down the block with their sweatpants dangling, however, with their hoodies on. And folks think that this is a show of power or a show of force. But I know, because I've been among those kids, it ultimately is fear. "

" 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. "

" You don't actually have control of the position people want you to be in. If they say, 'You king of the blacks,' you're king of the blacks - whether you like it or not. "

" There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy. "

" I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it. "

" 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. "

" The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited. "

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

" I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened. "

" 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. "

" I have never read 'To Kill A Mockingbird.' "

" I try to write in a way that makes people feel things. "

" I had to learn to not be so hard. And I had a wife and, at that time, a partner when Samori was born, and for most of Samori's life, a partner, who, for whatever reason, did not have to learn that and was very tender and very, very soft with him. "

" I write what I write in the way that I write it. I'm not being abstract, you know. I'm talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life. "