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" 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. "

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" 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

Kind

World

Side

" American myths have never been colorless. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Racism is a physical experience. "

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

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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Home

Loan

" 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. "

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

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

" The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that. "

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

" In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The FHA literally drew up the redlining map and then basically distributed - I'm sorry, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation actually did it, and then distributed to banks who used that as policy to determine how they would lend and who they would lend to. The racism in the system was pervasive and total. "

" The symbolic power of Barack Obama's presidency - that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons taking up residence in the castle - assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Power

Fear

" The president of the United States is not a king. You know? Barack Obama was elected by the American people. "

" 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. "

" The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite. "

" I've seen, and liked, 'Insecure' and 'Atlanta.' "

" 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. "

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

" Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book. "

" 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. "

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