Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Related Quotes:

" Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad. "

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

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 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

" With George Bush's policies, I could make an argument for how they affect black people in a negative way. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't argue that he's a white supremacist. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I think human societies tend to be problematic. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I don't want them to read what I'm writing and say, 'I think that's right,' and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I think it's really important to be conscious of yourself and the world around you. For me, that meant reading a lot and reporting. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" As a writer, I was shaped by a desire to write for black people. That things were not being represented. That was my motivating force. That it has become what it has become is shocking to me. I just wanted to be able to take care of my kids. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I love living around black people. Home is home. We suffer under racism and the physical deprivations that come with that, but beneath that, we form cultures and traditions that are beautiful. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" 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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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