Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail.

And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never fee...

In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. From that perspective, it seem...

Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.

Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin's black robes one moment, and Dorsett's spin move the next. This was what my father deeded--that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand th...

Some black people will always be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission.

I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy in all of its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself a...

Dad called it enlightenment but to me, it just felt lonely.

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. But democracy is a forgiving God and America's heresies—torture, t...

I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness. I resolved to hide nothing fr...

Mais une société qui en protège certains par un filet invisible d'écoles, d'emprunts immobiliers subventionnés, de richesses accumulées, et ne consent à t'offrir que la protection d'une justice crimin...

But one reason Obama rose so quickly was that African Americans are war-weary. It was not simply the country at large that was tired of the old baby boomer debates. Blacks, too, were sick of talking a...

I was not always a believer in reparations. I’d read TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson’s work on the subject in the late ’90s, which convinced me that the negative conditions of black people were t...

Whenever a woman smiled his way, she'd already begun dividing her life into trimesters.

We were laughing but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge… The law did not protect us...

He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected.

I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is.

In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: It had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and...