Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

The fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we...

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.

The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics.

I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you n...

Or l'insécurité ne fait que mettre des bornes à ta perception de la galaxie.

Racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.

And my eyes—my beautiful, precious eyes—were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on na...

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor - it is not so easy to...

I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.

Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.

Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the ’60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray a...

I am not a cynic. I love you, 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 kno...

There was nothing holy or particular in my skin; I was black because of history and heritage. There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning i...

Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of raci...

I wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear—even apart from me. I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this mus...

But the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.

Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plu...

No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.

Once we were slaves to haramu-fal. Once we were breed by men solely to give our bodies to other men. We have seen how the woman becomes the enslaved. Let us now show them how the enslaved becomes a le...