Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“My reasons for writing had to be my own, divorced from expectation.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation: These bonded white people into a broad aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.'

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“It is by choice not chance…that we choose to advance, The Marshall Team; We can achieve…We will achieve.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I get really, really concerned when I see somebody, taking $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, will not release what they're…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“You are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think 'Dear White People,' the show, is a tremendous artistic achievement. It's always hinting that there is something beyond the pleading…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Journalism gave me another tool of exploration, another way of unveiling the laws that bound my body... And with journalism, I could…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“So there was love, and specifically the desire to give to someone who had given so much to me. But too there…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

People review my comic books. People review every article I write - 'The Atlantic' even publishes them. A great deal of the…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I guess I'd be put in the ID politics camp. But there is really nothing in the world-view of, say, Bernie Sanders…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think the sad fact is, there's a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman. And I think…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“But what I remember most is the sense of impossibility with which Obama regarded the Trump presidency. I confess to basically feeling…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Still later, I read Ira Katznelson’s history of discrimination, When Affirmative Action Was White, which argued that similar exclusions applied to other…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others...

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Breitbart media is named after the same gentleman who basically framed Shirley Sherrod during the Obama administration.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find a way to live…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery,”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates