I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhat I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
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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.
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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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Racism is, among other things.
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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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