Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" When you write, you're inside the project. You can't really think about the reception. It has to be worth it even if no one reads it. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I don't want them to read what I'm writing and say, 'I think that's right,' and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history. Much of that violence, at least to some extent, you know, done by the very state that's supposed to protect them. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I think Barack Obama was born into a home not just to a white woman and white grandparents, but a white woman and white grandparents who shockingly told him it was okay that he was black and that he should not be ashamed of it and that he should, in fact, be proud of it. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I guess I'd be put in the ID politics camp. But there is really nothing in the world-view of, say, Bernie Sanders I actually disagree with. I'd like a guaranteed income, single-payer health care, a stronger safety net, etc. The problem is the temptation to paper over historically fraught issues to achieve that is tempting. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" When you know that people know who you are, you are always working - and not the work you want to do. You are sort of performing, because you know they are looking - or at least glancing - at you. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Life is always a problem. The fact that I'm on the radio saying that I don't necessarily see hope does not relieve people, does not relieve my son, does not relieve children, of the responsibility to struggle. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I was 24 when Samori was born. His mom was 23. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" With George Bush's policies, I could make an argument for how they affect black people in a negative way. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't argue that he's a white supremacist. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" You can't tolerate anybody attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with force. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates