Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world...

And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.

Art was not an after-school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It mus...

As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather...

As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood… any race or nationality, or any i...

As much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.

At this moment the phrase police reform has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of di...

Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, b...

But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing—that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I m...

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.

Cube’s album Death Certificate: Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation.

Enslaved' is what the plunderer does to a righteous woman. But a slave is a righteous woman who has accepted the plunderer's law. And not even the righteous have the power to grant such acceptance. Fr...

Even the Dreamers, lost in their great reverie, feel it, for it’s Billie they reach for in sadness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha the last sound they hear before...

From the White House down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr had a father,. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father...

I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

I had believed myself superior to my ancestors. But all it took was the proper amount of pain for me to return to the traditions of old. For even thinking such a thing, I am sorry. I apologize to you...

I had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often...

I have missed seeing you like this, brother. And how is that? At war.

I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this const...

I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion....