Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

You will have to man up, we tell our sons. Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father. This is what they had told me all my life.

Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable...

But a great number of educators spoke of personal responsibility in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of intention and personal responsibility...

But a great number of educators spoke of personal responsibility in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility.

The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick.

She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (whi...

The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a n...

I devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world,

Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was an...

The truth of us was always that you were our ring.

Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all it's brutalit...

What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell...

La rue fait de chaque journée une suite de questions piège, et chaque réponse incorrecte peut provoquer une raclée, une balle dans la peau, une grossesse non désirée. Personne n'en sort indemne. Pourt...

And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice.

What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible.

I could haveyou arrested! Which is tosay: I could take yourbody.

But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at t...

We know how we will die—with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest r...

Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say Trump is a white man like all the others wh...