Ta-Nehisi Coates Quote
The idea of race as an indelible attribute is a new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. These people are a modern invention whose 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 national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The idea of race as an indelible attribute is a new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. These people are a modern invention whose 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 national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth.