Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Related Quotes:

" Racism is a physical experience. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I try to write in a way that makes people feel things. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" Amiri Baraka went to Howard. Lucille Clifton went to Howard. Ossie Davis went to Howard. And I was aware of that when I was there. Charles Drew went to Howard. Thurgood Marshall went to the law school. Being aware of that and having all of that brought to bear, again, it's one of those things that I can't really separate from my career as a writer. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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

" 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

" Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows - and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Black And White

" American myths have never been colorless. "

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

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I think human societies tend to be problematic. "

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

" I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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

" The process of getting conscious, for me, was a very, very uncomfortable, disturbing, and sometimes physically painful process. And so that's the standard to which I write, because it was what I've experienced over my time. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates