Ta-Nehisi Coates Quote
I am so very proud of you — your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given — a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I am so very proud of you — your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given — a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body.
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About Ta-Nehisi Coates
In 2015, Coates received a MacArthur Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.
His work has been published in numerous periodicals. He has published four nonfiction books: The Beautiful Struggle (2008), Between the World and Me (2015), We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017), and The Message (2024). Between the World and Me won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has also written a Black Panther series and a Captain America series for Marvel Comics. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was published in 2019.