Ta-Nehisi Coates Quote
We forgot that there were those who loved that old country as it was, who did not lament the divisions, but drew power from them. And so, we saw postcards with watermelons on the white house lawn. We saw simian caricatures of the first family, the invocation of a food stamp president, and his anti-colonialist Islamist agenda. These were the fetishes that gathered the tribe of white supremacy, that rallied them to the age-old banner. And if there was one mistake, one reason why I did not see the coming tragedy, why I did not account for it's possibilities, it was because I had not yet truly considered that banners fearsome power.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
We forgot that there were those who loved that old country as it was, who did not lament the divisions, but drew power from them. And so, we saw postcards with watermelons on the white house lawn. We saw simian caricatures of the first family, the invocation of a food stamp president, and his anti-colonialist Islamist agenda. These were the fetishes that gathered the tribe of white supremacy, that rallied them to the age-old banner. And if there was one mistake, one reason why I did not see the coming tragedy, why I did not account for it's possibilities, it was because I had not yet truly considered that banners fearsome power.
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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.