Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There’s cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There’s an incredible amount.
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I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they’ve done it: what worked, what didn’t work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.
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The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn’t really have that present in my house.
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The FHA literally drew up the redlining map and then basically distributed – I’m sorry, the Home Owners‘ Loan Corporation actually did it, and then distributed to banks who used that as policy to determine how they would lend and who they would lend to. The racism in the system was pervasive and total.
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We’ve got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
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Racism is a physical experience.
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We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn’t actually come from the criminal justice system.
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White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers.
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Forgiveness is a big part of – especially post-civil rights movement – is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn’t raised within the Christian church; I wasn’t raised within any church.
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The two endorsements I’m most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.
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Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.
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If you are attempting to study American history, and you don’t understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America.
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American myths have never been colorless.
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It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.
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There’s a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world – about whose side God is on. Well, I didn’t have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.
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The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars – all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people.
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Kaepernick’s protest has been very successful. I really appreciate the fact that he’s been giving away money to organisations; he pledged to give away a million dollars, and he’s been doing it.
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There’s a long tradition of black folks pleading with white people. It’s a tradition that emerges from political necessity, so I get it; I’m just not very interested in it.
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Donald Trump begins his political career in birtherism. That idea is connected to a very, very old notion that African-Americans are not citizens.
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People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time.
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You had eight years before President Trump, a situation where the opposition party basically ran in opposition to the president on a platform of thinly based racism. That doesn’t mean that the politicians themselves were outright racist, but when charges of birtherism came up, no one repudiated it.
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We had particular policies in this country that resulted in the larger share of poverty that we have in African-American communities.
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Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows – and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere.
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Donald Trump did not appear by magic.
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I’m not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton‘s neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it’s there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation.
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Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe.
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Fighting, I guess, was never the real reason I read comic books as a kid. The fighting was an important part, an integral part of it; I don’t know I would’ve read it without it.
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African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning.
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