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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a0c0d74 | No, I can't argue with them," he thought; "they wear impenetrable armor, while I'm naked." | Anna Karenina | ||
| 88f59c7 | She had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater number of everyone I'd known. I felt then that these men - these 'fathers' - were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in our ranks. The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more - that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of wom.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9648847 | And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 388c6f7 | I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys...loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language an.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 38c49b4 | 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. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f6b4120 | I want to die with my boots on. English actors have a great reputation for longevity. | Anna Lee | ||
| 9532fd1 | I read his awful name, emblazon'd highWith golden letters on th' illumin'd sky. | Anna Letitia Barbauld | ||
| fd07694 | Come calm content serene and sweet,To find thy hermit cell. | Anna Letitia Barbauld | ||
| 9387dc9 | writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one's roots or expertise or even one's own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a325c75 | From hip-hop, I drew my earliest sense of what writing should mean. Grammar was never the point. Grammar was for the schoolmen and their television dreams. Out here, in the concrete and real, sentences should be supernatural, words strung together until they compelled any listener to repeat them at odd hours, long after the bass line had died. And these sentences or bars, linked together into verses, should have a shading and mood that refl.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 148989d | the jails springing up around me, that argued for ghettos and projects, that viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to the preservation of order. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 209a03e | But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity--not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience--then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a8792ac | The crude communal myth about black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to black women--either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative relationship between success and black culture. Before we actually had one, we could not imagine a black president who loved being black. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his first kiss with the woman who would become his wife as tasting ".. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8cffe0e | The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 488e108 | I think where I got frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath. Very rarely did I lose it publicly. Usually I'd just smile. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 09e0204 | Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation: These bonded white people into a broad aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c722a30 | But he said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. "To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn't mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line," he said. "It goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 95603fc | And now the lies of the Civil War and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8993aab | race" itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem." -- | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 0478cf2 | I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was--a gate to some other blue world. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a1b2958 | For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America's first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also a declaration of war. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e191741 | So there was nothing new in the suddenly transracial spirit that saw the country, in 2008, reaching "for the best part of itself." It had done so before--and then promptly retrenched in the worst part of itself. To see this connection, to see Obama's election as part of a familiar cycle, you would have had to understand how central the brand of white supremacy was to the country. I did not. I could remember, as a child, the nationalists cla.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7281ab8 | Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b955869 | Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them-- | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 56f1766 | The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 0f342c6 | Furthermore, as shown with neuroimaging, when contemplating mouthwash versus soap, those who had just spoken a lie activated parts of the sensorimotor cortex related to the mouth (i.e., the subjects were more aware of their mouths at the time); those who had written the lie activated the cortical regions mapping onto their hand. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 63f2388 | 1914, its first war on drugs,*13 passing the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine. The reasoning was unoriginal. "The use of cocaine by unfortunate women generally and by negroes in certain parts of the country is simply appalling," the American Pharmaceutical Association's Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit had concluded in 1902. The New York Times published an article by a physician sayi.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 10aad80 | Elijah Forrester, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, opposed the Eisenhower administration's 1956 civil rights bill on the grounds that "where segregation has been abolished," black villainy soon prospered.*16 "In the District of Columbia, the public parks have become of no utility whatever to the white race," Forrester claimed, "for they enter at the risk of assaults upon their person or the robbery of their personal effects." Unless s.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 727aeef | This story began, as all writing must, in failure. | opening-lines | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 262b830 | In the cities of the North, "European immigrants' struggle" for the credential of whiteness gave them the motive to oppress blacks, writes Christopher Muller, a sociologist at Columbia who studies incarceration: "A central way European immigrants advanced politically in the years preceding the first Great Migration was by securing patronage positions in municipal services such as law enforcement." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 552a138 | Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show ask me what it meant to loose my body. | opening-lines | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 24430c0 | America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional mor.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e61bef0 | By Obama's lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only "the United States of America." All these disparate strands of the American experience were bound together by a common hope: It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravel.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 39edec7 | You can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position," he said. "The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved. You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable--that can institutionalize the changes you seek--and to engage the other side." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| af9c514 | Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men. He blacks no masters boots, and bows the knee to no one save God alone. He receives higher wages for his labor, than does the laborer of any othe.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 44429f6 | Woodrow Wilson, when he addressed the crowd, did not mention slavery but asserted that the war's meaning could be found in "the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other's eyes." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9290600 | Just play this out as a thought experiment," he said. "Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America--but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America--is getting a really good education. And they're graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates th.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| aca55ae | I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster," he said. "And if you ask them, I'm sure they would say, 'No, actually what you're experiencing is not because you're black, it's because you're a Democrat.' " | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 131401f | But the underlying presumption--that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other--exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who'd won one competitive political race in her life, whose political instincts were questioned by her own advisers, who took more than half a million dollars in speaking fees from an investment bank because it was "what they offered," who proposed to bring back to the White House a former pr.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6928c32 | The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6416ce8 | Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body--it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor--it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so reg.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9df0ef4 | A legacy of plunder, a network of laws and traditions, a heritage, a Dream, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity. "Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black .. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5245980 | rights gradually awarded to the mass of European poor and oppressed, at precisely the same time they were being stripped from enslaved Africans and their descendants. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e6e01e5 | White men," wrote Mississippi senator and eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, "have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill the position here occupied by the servile race." | Ta-Nehisi Coates |