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
Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications.
He has published three non-fiction books: The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, and We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. 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.
In 2015 he received a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation.