Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us.

To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the schools and their façade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the world of dreamers. I loved him because he made it plain, n...

I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of 'race' - 'race'...

The Jim Crow South, writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political science professor at Columbia, was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without. The marks of that collaboration are...

They were made of small hard things—aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture...

And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians...

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And

He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?

A hostile reading of those words hinges on a misunderstanding of the complexities of segregation. In fact, for the legions of black people who grew up like Michelle Obama—in a functioning, self-contai...

If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.

This is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find a way to live within the all of it

Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it somehow must be your fault. Trayvon

And I felt, even in this time, a century later, that I too would gather my words and scream into the roaring waves, because to scream was to defy the story, and that defiance had meaning, no matter th...

They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts an...

They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only i...

The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of Yeah, nigger, what’s up now? were not unrelated. And this violence was not...

They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the D...

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...