Top 100 Ta Nehisi Coates Quotes
#1. President Obama's friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama's previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a genocidal weight of whiteness.
George Gilder
#2. Black-on black crime' is jargon, violence on language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#3. I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#4. 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
#5. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#6. It was like falling in love - the things that get you are so small, the things that keep you up at night are so particular to you that when you try to explain, the only reward anyone can give you is a dumb polite nod.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#8. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#9. It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#10. Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#11. To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#12. What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through
that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#13. And you are here now, and you must live - and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your own home.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#14. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#15. When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#16. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#17. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#19. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#20. I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#21. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#22. I wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear - even apart from me. I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#23. I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#24. Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing "mere" about symbols.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#25. If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#26. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#27. In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#28. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#29. traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#30. We are all so injured, daughter-- all of us. Even him-- perhaps especially him. This name-- haramu-fal-- was made to mock him. But perhaps it mocks us all. Perhaps it speaks to all of our losses.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#31. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#32. You have the right to every end of your exploration and no motherfucker anywhere can tell you otherwise ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#33. I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead in hopes that the predators would move to an actual fight.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#35. We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#36. I didn't always have things,
but I had people - I always
had people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#37. 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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#38. Through the windshield I
saw the mark of these
ghettos - the abundance of
beauty shops, churches,
liquor stores, and
crumbling housing - and I
felt the old fear. Through
the windshield I saw the
rain coming down in
sheets.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#39. We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#40. My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#41. The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#42. Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#43. Why - for us and only us - is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies?
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#44. The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#45. That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter?
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#46. 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
#47. The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#48. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#49. We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#50. I almost never danced, as much as I wanted to. I was crippled by some childhood fear of my own body.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#51. And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#52. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#53. My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#54. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#55. But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons. There
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#56. This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#57. 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
#58. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#59. but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#60. North Lawndale's Jewish People's Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a 'pilot community for interracial living.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#61. Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#63. 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
#64. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#65. I should never have left you. I was caught between fealty to my world and fealty to my blood. I chose wrong. I was a king. I held the knife. I acted as a king should. But I did not act as family should.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#66. And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me ... .
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#67. It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#68. Her country crumbling to dust, and with broken men all around, Queen Shuri went off to her doom. I could have gone with her. But someone had to fight and someone had to live. And after we parted, I wondered- still wonder- how a man walks away and leaves his only sister to die.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#69. Do not speak to me of martyrdom, of men who die to be remembered on some parish day. I don't believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like castanets will echo me. SONIA SANCHEZ
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#70. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#71. But the price of error is
higher for you than it is for
your countrymen, and so
that America might justify
itself, the story of a black
body's destruction must
always begin with his or
her error, real or imagined ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#72. The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#73. To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#74. I am ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#75. The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#76. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#77. Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream. An
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#78. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#79. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#80. This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#81. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#82. If you're black, you were born in jail, Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home from school, in my lack of control over my body.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#83. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#84. I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#85. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#86. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#87. The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#88. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#89. And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#90. These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#91. Hmm... 'our' country? I have not spoken in this manner in some years. But Wakanda is my home. Wakanda is our home.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#92. Where others saw America in lovely columns, marvels of engineering, and refined democrats, Dad saw only masks concealing the heralds of woe.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#93. Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,' wrote Wiley. 'Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#94. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#95. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#96. Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism - the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them - inevitably follows from this inalterable condition.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#97. Among the people in that room, all those centuries ago, my body, breakable at will, endangered in the streets, fearful in the schools, was not closest to the queen's but to her adviser's, who'd been broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she'd ever seen, could sit.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#98. Of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#99. I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#100. 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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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