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Ta-Nehisi Coates
59 quotes
“I'm looking to avoid a subtly demeaning subtext which holds that reading, say, is something you should do--like flossing or taxes or laundry. I don't want to speak for women writers, but I recoil at the idea of someone reading my book because they really should read a black author or two. I don't want to be an icebreaker at your corporation's Kwanzaa gathering.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Damned Mob of Scribbling Women, The Atlantic, (3 Jun 2011)
“[M]y goal is to get kids to own their education. I don't think I can hector them into doing this. I don't think I can shame them into doing it. I do think that I might be able to affect some sort of internal motivation. So I try to get them to see that every subject they study has the potential to open up a universe. I really mean this.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: If I Were a Black Kid: Advice for students in Baltimore County and Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Atlantic, (7 Jun 2013)
“Weakness, misery, does not always elicit sympathy. Perhaps that is because the weakness reminds of what we we fear for ourselves. Or perhaps it reminds us of our own complicity in some broad crime, and more, our presumed helplessness for it to be any other way.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes From the Blue Period, The Atlantic, (6 Oct 2013)
“No other athlete in a major sport gives so much of his body and gets so little in return than the average player on a NFL team.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richie Incognito and the Banality of Supermacho, The Atlantic, (6 Nov 2013)
“Mr. [Clyde] Ross at that time, like most African Americans around the country, was unable to secure a loan, due to policies around redlining and deciding, you know, who deserved the loans and who doesn’t. There was a broad, broad consensus that African Americans, for no other reason besides blanket racism, could not be responsible homeowners.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Case for Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Reckoning with U.S. Slavery & Institutional Racism, Democracy Now!, Part 1, (29 May 2014)
“When people wanted to criticize the Affordable Care Act they would often say “This is reparations. This is reparations.” Liberals [were often saying (somewhat indistinct)] “No, no, no. This isn’t for black people. This will benefit everybody.” In a just world we would say “Yes. This does disproportionately benefit black people and that’s a very, very good thing because for most of our history we have disproportionately injured black people and our policy should be structured in such a way that take that into account.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Segregation, Housing Discrimination and 'The Case for Reparations,' Democracy Now! Part 1, (May 30, 2014)
“You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ibid. (May 30, 2014) Part 2, Democracy Now!
“[James Baldwin is] probably the biggest influence on me from a literary perspective.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Between the World and Me': Ta-Nehisi Coates Extended Interview on Being Black in America," Democracy Now! (July 22, 2015)
“Racism isn’t just morally wrong, it makes for poor story-telling.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Wakanda and the Black Imagination, The Atlantic, (16 Dec 2015)
“Sometimes the moral course lies within the politically possible, and sometimes the moral course lies outside of the politically possible. One of the great functions of radical candidates is to war against equivocators and opportunists who conflate these two things. Radicals expand the political imagination and, hopefully, prevent incrementalism from becoming a virtue.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?, The Atlantic, (19 Jan 2016)
“Some part of us believes in nonviolence not as an ideal worth striving for, but as a fairy tale passed on to the politically weak.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Killing Dylann Roof, The Atlantic, (26 May 2016)
“The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Killing Dylann Roof, The Atlantic, (26 May 2016)
“Any writer who takes as their starting place any doubt as to their own humanity, or the humanity of their subject, has already lost. The real questions, the questions in that writer’s heart, are never explored. And instead they are stuck answering the same set of questions that they’ve, long ago, resolved. For black writers, this is a formula for never evolving, for writing the same thing over and over. For black writers the danger is having their work devolve into workshop on racial sensitivity.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: But This Latter Person, I Am Not Trying To Convince', The Atlantic, (23 June 2016)
“There was the normal high that comes from the hormones of youth, that fresh sense of being unchained. But also there was the omnipresent feeling that It could go down. In those moments—which back then were all of our moments—your neurology was always code red.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In , Dad found a literature of himself. He'd read and , but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was how I came to understand, how I came to know why all these brothers wrote and talked so big. Even the Knowledged feared the streets. But the rhyme pad was a spell book—it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. That summer, I knew what Fruitie was trying to say, that when under the aegis of , you never lived alone, you never walked alone.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I built not by parental edict, not under threat, but because of my own native yearning. This was a giant step toward seeing more. Across the country our elders were battling the shades that shrank our minds and abbreviated our world. We thought the corner was cool, but more than that we deeply believed that we could do no better, that this tiny parcel was all we deserved in this world of sin.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[In the mid-90s] The older gods were falling off. were breaking. had taken us as far as they could, and already the new voices were being hijacked by the death cults. Brothers who last week were shouting out were flipped into studio gangsters, killing every nigger in sight.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because ... America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 country to an exceptional moral standard.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any claim to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've never felt the pride that is supposed to come with righteous self-defense and justified violence. Whenever it was me on top of someone, whatever my rage in the moment, afterward I always felt sick at having been lowered to the crudest form of communication.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, the two great crimes in American history is obviously...the near destruction...of this country’s Native American population, the theft of their land, and on to work that land was brought in native Africans into this country, beginning in 1619. Those twin processes profoundly altered the shape of the world and made this country possible. Obviously, first of all, you know, the land on which America and Americans currently reside was the land of Native Americans, but the people brought in to break that land just transformed it.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The profits derived from slavery are more extreme than I think are commonly acknowledged. As I said yesterday, in 1860, the combined worth of the 4 million enslaved black people in this country was some $3 billion, nearly $75 billion in today’s share of dollars. Cotton, in 1860, was this country’s largest export—not just its largest export, it was the majority of exports out of this country. So, from a financial perspective, just the economics of it, it’s absolutely impossible to imagine America without enslavement.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The average African-American family in this country making $100,000, which is, you know, decent money, actually lives in the same kind of neighborhood that the average white family making $35,000 a year lives in. That is totally tied to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow and the input and the idea in the mind that white people and black people are somehow deserving of different things.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I injure you, the injury persists even after I actually commit the act. If I stab you, you may suffer complications long after that initial actual stabbing. If I shoot you, you may suffer complications long after that initial shooting. That’s the case with African Americans. There are people well within the living memory of this country that are still suffering from the after-effects of that.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This whole thing about who should get a check, and should we cut checks, you know, I understand those questions. That’s great. Those people should support H.R. 40, though, because that’s what H.R. 40 does. It tries to get that figured out, and get that math figured out, and figure out the best way to do it. But if we don’t actually have a study, we can’t actually answer those questions. You can’t ask a doctor to make a diagnosis before there’s an actual examination.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And in terms of poverty and race in this country, again, you know, one of the things that I really, really wanted to stress is, the level of poverty specifically that you see in the African-American community is not accidental. It’s not accidental. This is part of the process. The process of enslavement involves stealing something from someone. It involves taking something from someone.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jim Crow was theft. First and foremost, it was theft. If I tax you or if tell you you have to be loyal to this country and pledge fealty to its laws, but then I don’t give you the same degree of protection, I don’t give you the same access to resources that I give to another group of people, I have effectively stolen something from you. I have stolen your tax money. I have stolen your fealty.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So, when the state of Mississippi, for instance, taxes black people and then builds one facility for education and another for—one facility for education for whites and then an inferior facility for blacks, that’s theft. That’s theft. If I build a public pool system and then tell you you can’t use that public pool system, that’s theft.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And so, that is the long history of this country, that doesn’t end, again, conservatively, until 1968. And so, there are people who are very, very much alive who have experienced that, who are suffering the after-effects and effects of that. And that’s what, you know, as far as I’m concerned, the whole movement around reparations is about.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mitch McConnell... does not want to be responsible for enslavement that happened 150 years ago, but, yet and still, wants the right to operate his business or operate his career in a building that was built by enslaved people.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think the testimony was that one should not receive payment that would properly be due to the enslaved. But this country is, to this very day, receiving payment that was due to its enslavers. That’s the way inheritance works in this country, however one might feel about that. If I assemble a mass of money, I have the right to pass that on to my kid. My kid has the right to do whatever and then pass it on to their kid. And so, there’s something fundamentally injust if I have secured that money by taking it from one group, and then I pass that money on to my kid.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Joe Biden shouldn’t be president. You know? You know, obviously, I don’t think I’m breaking any news here. You know, if he ends up being the nominee, better him than Trump, but I think that’s a really, really low standard.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think when you have somebody who is celebrating their relationship, the ability of a person who saw no problem depriving an entire population of African Americans in their state of the right to vote, the right to participate as American citizens, the fact that that person was polite to them?... And so, I don’t know what is going on in your brain where you decide to celebrate the fact these people were polite.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, Joe Biden says that he’s been involved with civil rights his entire career. It’s worth remembering Joe Biden opposed busing and bragged about it, you know, in the 1970s. Joe Biden is on the record as being to the right of actually the New Democrats in the 1990s on the issue of mass incarceration, wanted more people sentenced to the death penalty, wanted more jails. And so, you know, I’m not surprised. I mean, this is who Joe Biden is.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A large portion of this country... want to see somebody who can beat Trump. I get that. And there is, you know, a feeling, I think, among certain people that Joe Biden can out-white-man Donald Trump.... I get that beating Donald Trump is extremely, externally important. I get that. But I just hope that that’s the floor and not the ceiling.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, I think I should say before I say that, my understanding is that Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40. I think that’s where we are now. So I’m obviously pretty pleased about that.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We feared [Ryland's Hounds] and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake. (p. 57)”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Case for Reparations," The Atlantic (June 2014)
“When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nonviolence as Compliance, The Atlantic, (27 April 2015)
“Our folks understood that there was a war upon us and that school was a weapon that outdid any Glock. Yet the whole process—with its equally spaced desks, precisely timed periods and lectures, with its standardized pencils and tests—felt unnatural to me. But much as I hated their terms, having been impressed into them, I hated more the failing. So I was left with a great unconscious sadness, an emptiness which, even when I was alone, I was not fully aware. But it worked on me like an invisible weight, altered my laughter, posture, my approach to girls. Fuck what you have heard or what you have seen in your son. He may lie about homework and laugh when the teacher calls home. He may curse his teacher, propose arson for the whole public system. But inside is the same sense that was in me. None of us ever want to fail. None of us want to be unworthy, to not measure up.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nowadays, I cut on the tube and see the dumbfounded looks, when over some minor violation of name and respect, a black boy is found leaking on the street. The anchors shake their heads. The activists give their stupid speeches, praising mythical days when all disputes were handled down at Ray's Gym. Politicians step up to the mic, claim the young have gone mad, their brains infected, and turned superpredator. Fuck you all who've ever spoken so foolishly, who've opened your mouths like we don't know what this is. We have read the books you own, the scorecards you keep—done the math and emerged prophetic. We know how we will die—with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs forth from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. 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 plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source