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" People sort of went crazy when 'BTWAM' came out. I'm happy a bunch of people read it. I'm happy it touched so many people. I'm less happy that it became an object for certain folks or was discussed that way. I'm less happy that journalists started scrolling through my kid's Instagram account. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Started

Way

Crazy

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" You don't make a case for reparations thinking, 'Oh yeah, people are gonna love this.' I didn't see that coming. "

" If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works. "

" Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country. "

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

" There's a long tradition of black folks pleading with white people. It's a tradition that emerges from political necessity, so I get it; I'm just not very interested in it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Fighting, I guess, was never the real reason I read comic books as a kid. The fighting was an important part, an integral part of it; I don't know I would've read it without it. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi. "

" I am always surprised people are surprised that people haven't read things. "

" We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Losers

" If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow. "

" White supremacy is a very, very popular and trenchant belief in this country's history and heritage. "

" 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. "

" We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that. "

" I had no expectations of white people at all. "

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

" I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don't want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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 don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists. "

" 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. "

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

" The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house. "