“ Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state. Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questi… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards' code of ethics warned that a Realtor should never be in… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an i… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner. Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ 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 le… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timb… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others... Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ [whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our nat… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ I think one has to even abandon the phrase "ally" and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours. Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ 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
“ I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective i… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ Assessing Miller's rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation. Miller had, on some fundamental level, misunderstood the aims of the white men who sought to destroy Re… Ta-Nehisi Coates
“ Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime--the generational destruction of human bodies--and all of its related offenses--domestic terrorism… Ta-Nehisi Coates
