Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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51. “To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

52. “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

53. “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

54. “Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies – torture, theft, enslavement – are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

55. “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,′ wrote Wiley. ‘Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

56. “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

57. “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

58. “The essence of American racism is disrespect.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

59. “And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

60. “The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

61. “I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown. Love was not concerned with any deep knowledge of its object, of their wants and dreams, but mainly with the joy felt in their presence and the sickness felt in their departure.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

62. “There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. But.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

63. “To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

64. “The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

65. “We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

66. “It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

67. “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

68. “You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance – no matter how improved – as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

69. “It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

70. “I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

71. “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.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

72. “I grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. There was no room for softness. But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else – that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

73. “The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

74. “I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

75. “The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

76. “I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

77. “Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you, and said, “You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

78. “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.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

79. “I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was once a burial ground for the auctioned there. They built a department store over part of it and then tried to erect a government building over another part.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

80. “Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, honestly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would knuckle up, call on cousins and crews, and if it came to it, pull guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out of their parents’ homes and discovered that America had guns and cousins, too.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

81. “Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

82. “In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live – specifically, how do I live free in this black body?”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

83. “But her beauty and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me – the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

84. “My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers – even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious” – as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

85. “It’s a cruel thing to do to children, to raise them as though they are siblings, and then set them against each other so that one shall be queen and the other shall be a footstool.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

86. “I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world. –.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

87. “For Americans, the hardest part of paying reparations would not be the outlay of money. It would be acknowledging that their most cherished myth was not real.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

88. “But we must tell our stories, and not be ensnared by them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

89. “I am ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

90. “You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

91. “This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello – which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

92. “I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us – Christians, Muslims, atheists – lived in this fear of this truth.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

93. “Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

94. “At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies – cotton – was America’s primary export.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

95. “Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

96. “I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

97. “But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

98. “Black is beautiful – which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

99. “And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

100. “I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates