Coates Quotes & Sayings

Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism - the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them - inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Experience is knowing what not to do and knowing when not to do it. — Dennis Coates

Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American. You don't just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black," said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. "And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals." And there it is - the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.* — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me ... . — Ta-Nehisi Coates

To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

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 know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful-the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. And this is not reducible to just you-the women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you never will know. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, "I've got to go," and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn't hug you, and I didn't comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The new people were something else before they were white - Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish - and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps — Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am so very proud of you - your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given - a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And I remember that I have come to bring you back, in the full ambition that it is you who will bring all of us back. What have you discovered here, Shuri? — Ta-Nehisi Coates

So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to "be twice as good," which is to say "accept half as much." These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

This need to be always in guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence of the world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, a contort again so as not to give the police a reason. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children's lifetime or even in their grandchildren's lifetime. So fatalism isn't really an option. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

But a great number of educators spoke of "personal responsibility" in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

But the price of error is
higher for you than it is for
your countrymen, and so
that America might justify
itself, the story of a black
body's destruction must
always begin with his or
her error, real or imagined ... — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Cube's album Death Certificate: "Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully. Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

What 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 — Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don't want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could - and must - fashion the way of our walk. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I started out in 1985, and I was Inmate #1 in every prison movie made from '85 to '93. — Kim Coates

I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Later, I would hear it in Dad's voice - "Either I can beat him, or the police." Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn't. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. — 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 both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from 'restrictive covenants' to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

President Obama's friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama's previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a genocidal weight of whiteness. — George Gilder

There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth." — David C. Coates

I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself ... I was was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Race is the child of racism, not the father. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, 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

I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver. I'm asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love, and the world is mine! — Florence Earle Coates

And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Still, I had that ignorant confidence derived from the encouragement of mothers. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You... kill... what you cannot control. Break... what you cannot bend. Is this what all my teachings have brought you to? Victory by any means? Conquest? Terror? You say you oppose kings, and yet your methods do not differ from theirs. You say you war against tyranny, but you too war against your own people. You say you bring the power of life. Then how did it happen that your very name became death? — Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Focusing on a person's positive attributes is an incredible way to give love. — Denise Coates

As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country's second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to, when you have rejected the Dream. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything - cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

hubris syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by recklessness, an inattention to detail, overwhelming self-confidence and contempt for others; all of which, he observes, "can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale." The syndrome, he continues, "is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader. — John M. Coates

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was "white," and so Tolstoy "mattered," like everything else that was white "mattered. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. - Ta — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children - fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body in his small hands. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

An alliance with the haramu-ful has always been a perilous thing. Perilous for his mother and father. For his friends. For his wife. For his people. Perilous for you. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. — 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 series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I barely leave my cage, my house. — Kim Coates

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 almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of 'race' - 'race' itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard - usually believing himself white - proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same 'race.' But a great number of 'black' people are already beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead 'races' (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose - the organization of people beneath, and beyond, and the umbrella of rights. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

The more grateful we feel, the more things we receive to feel grateful for. The more loved we feel, the more love we receive. The more beautiful we feel, the more attractive we become. — Denise Coates

Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing
myself. Here was the lesson: I was not innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God? — Ta-Nehisi Coates

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term "people" to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of "government of the people," but the means by which "the people" acquired their names. This — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I knew about wild plums twice before I tasted any. — Grace Stone Coates

There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the "white" from the "black," even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. I — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, — Ta-Nehisi Coates

This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love living around black people. Home is home. We suffer under racism and the physical deprivations that come with that, but beneath that, we form cultures and traditions that are beautiful. — Ta-Nehisi Coates