Ta-Nehisi Coates Quote
The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black, said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals. And there it is--the right to break the black body as a meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.*You and I, my son, are that below. That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.* Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage.
The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black, said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals. And there it is--the right to break the black body as a meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.*You and I, my son, are that below. That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.* Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage.
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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.