Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery,

I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.

I know that gentrification is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these...

I learned this living among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident.

I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, yo...

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog.

I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with...

I saw, not so much a culture of pathology, as a culture fitted for a pathological world. To fight, stab, or shoot over respect seemed ridiculous to those who already had the society's respect. But all...

I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why--for us and only us--is the other side of free will and free spirits a...

I should never have left you. I was caught between fealty to my world and fealty to my blood. I chose wrong. I was a king. I held the knife. I acted as a king should. But I did not act as family shoul...

I sought a world where peasants and kings were as brothers. But what new world was ever made without the sword? Now I am old, and I fear that some young dreamer shall resolve my contradiction, and com...

I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps i...

I think where I got frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the...

Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed. And still the questions behind the questions are never asked. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered w...

My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.

Obama’s keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him. To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. That is the tradit...

One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our countr...

Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never u...

Sometimes it is subtle—the simple observation of who lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it’s all of it at once. I have never asked how you became personally aware of the dista...

That families are better off the stronger and more stable they are is self-evidently important. But so is the notion that no family can ever be made impregnable, that families are social structures ex...