Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

1914, its first war on drugs,*13 passing the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine. The reasoning was unoriginal. The use of cocaine by unfortunate women general...

A legacy of plunder, a network of laws and traditions, a heritage, a Dream, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity. Black-on-black crime...

A society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at...

African Americans understood they were at war, and reacted accordingly: running away, rebelling violently, fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and—less spectacularly, though more signifi...

All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be twice as good, which is to say accept half as much. These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though...

All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be twice as good, which is to say accept half as much.

America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.

Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God.

Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term h...

An alliance with the haramu-ful has always been a perilous thing. Perilous for his mother and father. For his friends. For his wife. For his people. Perilous for you.

And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of t...

And I knew that there were children born into these same caged neighborhoods on the Westside, these ghettos, each of which was planned as any subdivision. They are an elegant act of racism, killing fi...

And I remember that I have come to bring you back, in the full ambition that it is you who will bring all of us back. What have you discovered here, Shuri?

And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter.

And now the lies of the Civil War and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave. America had a b...

And now the lies of the Civil War and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave.

And she could not lean on her country for help. When it came to her son, Dr. Jones's country did what it does best-- it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the D...

And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. Bu...

And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to h...

And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns...