Ta-Nehisi Coates Quote
There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been black, and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the white from the black, even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range.
There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been black, and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the white from the black, even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range.
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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.