Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punish...

There was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.

Americans who think they are white regard us—something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular problem, nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If t...

Among the people in that room, all those centuries ago, my body, breakable at will, endangered in the streets, fearful in the schools, was not closest to the queen’s but to her adviser’s, who’d been b...

And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all lif...

And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket.

And we were all aware that the forces that held back our bodies back at home were not unrelated to those that had given France its wealth. We were aware that much of what they had done was built on th...

At football games the other students would cheer the star black running back, and then when a black player on the other team got the ball, they’d yell, Kill that nigger! Kill that nigger! They would y...