Ta-Nehisi Coates

Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system. It was made that way. And what…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers.…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty,…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

The symbolic power of Barack Obama's presidency - that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons taking up residence in…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don't know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn't feel like a line…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Five years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S.…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

The thing people have to remember is there's nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else's chancy hood, his…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America's first black codes, the…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

The FHA literally drew up the redlining map and then basically distributed - I'm sorry, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation actually did…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people,…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Ideas like cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption had no meaning for me. The truth was in the everything that came…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

We look at young black kids with a scowl on their face, walking a certain way down the block with their sweatpants…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates