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" 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. "

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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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

America

Racism

Remember

" I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.' "

" I wasn't the biggest Captain America fan, but increasingly, I see him as a great character. Winter Soldier really got into what it meant to actually represent America. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Abraham Lincoln was killed by the forces of white supremacy. "

" Racism is a physical experience. "

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

" The only people who usually have input on my writing are my wife and my editor. I'm not in conversation with anyone except the people I report on and the people I work with. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" The Ku Klux Klan is the most profligate domestic terrorist organization in this country's history. "

" When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism. "

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

" 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. "

" People review my comic books. People review every article I write - 'The Atlantic' even publishes them. A great deal of the critique of 'Between the World and Me' was from a feminist perspective. bell hooks pushed back, among others. Some of that has value. Some of it does not. I try my best to separate the wheat from the chaff. "

" 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. "

" 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

Writing

Want

" People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time. "