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" Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

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. "

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" Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I'm not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton's neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it's there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. And many of those folks also, at the very least, gave land to African Americans when they were liberated. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" You had eight years before President Trump, a situation where the opposition party basically ran in opposition to the president on a platform of thinly based racism. That doesn't mean that the politicians themselves were outright racist, but when charges of birtherism came up, no one repudiated it. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.' "

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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Throughout his eight years in office, Barack Obama endured a campaign of illegitimacy waged either by pluralities or majorities of the Republican party. Donald Trump rooted his candidacy in that campaign. It's fairly obvious. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" If I could have anything - you know, and this is across the board for any presidential candidate - I would have a greater acknowledgment of history in our policy and in our affairs. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates