Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

But the underlying presumption—that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other—exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who’d won one competitive political race in her lif...

But then he grabbed the mic like a cudgel, raised it to the sky, lightning struck, and the cudgel was now a hammer, and the slave was transfigured into a god whose voice shivered the Earth. And that i...

But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt's New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow South, writes Ira Katznelson, a history and...

But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion...

But what I remember most is the sense of impossibility with which Obama regarded the Trump presidency. I confess to basically feeling the same. It seemed to me that white people, if only out of an ins...

But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. They have been taught to labor, the Chicago Tribune editorialized in...

But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, wi...

But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn't. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson - not...

But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious.

By Obama’s lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only the United States of America. All these disparat...

Debating Abraham Lincoln during the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, Stephen Douglas asserted that this government was made on the white basis and that the Framers had made no referenc...

Deception is parcel to ruling. I tell my enemies, my allies, and my subjects what they need to know, when I feel they need to know it. This philosophy tends to have some effects. A man cannot take it...

Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional.

Don’t give up your life, preserve your life, he would say. And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven.

Educated children never offered excuses—certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls.

Either you are a nation, or you are nothing.

Elijah Forrester, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, opposed the Eisenhower administration’s 1956 civil rights bill on the grounds that where segregation has been abolished, black villainy soon pr...

Enslaved is what the plunderer does to a righteous woman but a slave is a righteous woman who has accepted the plunderer's law.

Even in their final hours, my parents had hope. Once, they had put their hope in Wakanda. Now, they put their hope in Killmonger who would make Niganda great. Greater than even Wakanda. He promised th...

Even in those pieces that seemed to be casually tossed off, I was always searching for the right word, for the proper escape from the clichés that threatened every sentence, from truisms that threaten...