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" 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

Party

Office

Donald Trump

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" I wouldn't argue that Mitt Romney is a white supremacist. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think 'Dear White People,' the show, is a tremendous artistic achievement. It's always hinting that there is something beyond the pleading and wokeness, something that the show's more militant characters can't see. "

" It's kind of selfish to say that you're only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning. "

" 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. "

" 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

Experience

Black

" I think human societies tend to be problematic. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Place

People

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

" 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. "

" The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. "

" 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. "

" The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in. "

" 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. "