Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and herita...

There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and wil...

Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing ligh...

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seekin...

I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal—a world more humane.

I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.

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...

And it occurred to me then thatyou would not escape, thatthere were awful menwho’d laid plans for you,and I could not stop them.Prince Jones was thesuperlative of all my fears.And if he, good Christia...

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. And then they would have to determine h...

You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have...

I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior—they certainly did not curb mine—but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness.

These were the injuries, among any others, that Sologon- the so-called Buffalo Woman- was made to carry. But every dart endured, every torture tolerated, tempered her. Sologon grew strong. Ruthless. H...

You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

Race is the child of racism, not the father.

Not just because of the black people swept away but because I know that gentrification is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the in...

She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. There he was, she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is...

What any institution, or its agents, intend for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim...

Here is what I would like you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body -- it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor -- it is not so easy to g...

Love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. And

We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the nu...