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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2282a4e | We are warriors." "And yet a moment ago, you were women." "Mother, I swear it, I am doing all I can." "And I am sorry, daughter, but you are going to have to do more." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 65a82f8 | African Americans understood they were at war, and reacted accordingly: running away, rebelling violently, fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and--less spectacularly, though more significantly--refusing to work, breaking tools, bending a Christian God to their own interpretation, stealing back the fruits of their labor, and, in covert corners of their world, committing themselves to the illegal act of learning to read. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e0848fb | Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war, and subsequently turned the antebellum South into a police state. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 2c2cc75 | Always lurking among Malcolm's condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion--"You're better than you think you are," he seemed to say to us. "Now act like it." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bcfa579 | In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 3228889 | Death lies heavy upon one who, known exceedingly well by all, dies unknown to himself." --SENECA, THYESTES," | Ryan Holiday | ||
| babbf76 | The noble white labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, nor bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America's original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price for even incremental gains for the white masses. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e0b3a20 | Son," my father said of Obama, "you know the country got to be messed up for them folks to give him the job." | politics presidents race race-relations racism | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 189c935 | The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face t.. | freedom mythology race race-relations racism slavery war | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 5307ec8 | Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime--the generational destruction of human bodies--and all of its related offenses--domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances .. | america american-history exploitation history race race-relations slavery whiteness | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 372ded7 | but talent is nothing without a field on which to display its gifts. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a25eca4 | He laughed, then continued, "The reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, '[Don't] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don't care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?' " | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7d073e1 | Trump truly is something new--the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his correct name and rightful honorific--America's first white president. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5b27e59 | I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tale.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 3c85015 | The symbolic power of Barack Obama's presidency--that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons from taking up residence in the castle--assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries. And it was that fear that gave the symbols Donald Trump deployed--the symbols of racism--enough potency to make him president, and thus put him in position to injure the world. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| fa1bb36 | When it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in some way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. And this is because, at its core, those American myths have never been colorless. They can not be extricated from the theory that a class of people carry peonage in their blood. That peon class provided the foundation on which all those myths and .. | racism | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 388cb3e | Americans, too belong to a class--one responsible for and intrinsically tied to a history of torture, bombings, and coups d'etat carried out in our name. And Trump has only heaped more upon the burden. In the global context, perhaps, we Americans are all white. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5994bdc | Even in those pieces that seemed to be casually tossed off, I was always searching for the right word, for the proper escape from the cliches that threatened every sentence, from truisms that threatened to steer me back into the sentimental dream. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a5fbddf | 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. America had a biography, and in that biography, the shackling of black people - slaves and free - featured prominently...what I sensed was a country trying to skip out on a bill, trying to stave off a terrible accounting. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e42a2cc | For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d3f49dc | My reasons for writing had to be my own, divorced from expectation. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a90d5cd | Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation - those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, "He should have stayed in school," and then wash its hands of him." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d156c7b | white innocence--the need to believe that whatever might befall the country, white America is ultimately blameless. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8193792 | The thing is, a black man can't be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that's still out there," Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama, told the journalist Gwen Ifill after the 2008 election. "However, an extraordinary, gifted, and talented young man who happens to be black can be president." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8018686 | Debating Abraham Lincoln during the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, Stephen Douglas asserted that "this government was made on the white basis" and that the Framers had made "no reference either to the Negro, the savage Indians, the Feejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cada4a5 | Racial attitudes had a significantly greater impact on health care opinions when framed as part of President Obama's plan than they had when the exact same policies were attributed to President Clinton's 1993 health care initiative. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6043aa4 | The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama's presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bfc78b7 | a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances--proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders--and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b71bfaf | But one reason Obama rose so quickly was that African Americans are war-weary. It was not simply the country at large that was tired of the old baby boomer debates. Blacks, too, were sick of talking about affirmative action and school busing. There was a broad sense that integration had failed us, and a growing disenchantment with our appointed spokespeople. Obama's primary triumphs in predominantly white states gave rise to rumors of a new.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6351267 | And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are relate-but cannot stand in for o.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 0a34597 | This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers who felt my work ethic did not match my potential, of black college professors who taught me intellectual rigor. And they did this in a world that every day insulted their humanity. It was not so much that the black layabouts and deadbeats Oba.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f4e2165 | The older poets were Ethelbert Miller, Kenneth Carroll, Brian Gilmore. It is important that I tell you their names, that you know that I have never achieved anything alone. | poetry poets ta-nehisi-coates-quote theory | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| c5ee3a6 | So there was love, and specifically the desire to give to someone who had given so much to me. But too there was a need to liberate myself from old models. I did not want a good woman behind me, beside me, in front of me, or proximate to me in any of the old and maudlin ways. | marriage | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 3e7d936 | That families are better off the stronger and more stable they are is self-evidently important. But so is the notion that no family can ever be made impregnable, that families are social structures existing within larger social structures. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 194b038 | When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. 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, and | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bd4d2a9 | The fact of Barack Obama, of Michelle Obama, changed our lives. Their very existence opened a market. It is important to say this, to say it in this ugly, inelegant way. It is important to remember the inconsequence of one's talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate. I knew it even as it was happening. I felt that I had not changed, but the world was changing around me. It was as if I had spent my years jig.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c8043e9 | 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,c all 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 t.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a9f9ae7 | The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes," charged the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, "is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we're seeing now." That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven int.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 57bee04 | I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related--but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal--a world more humane. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a9afe36 | I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next. | parenting | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 0e824de | It has been said that the first black presidency was mostly "symbolic," a dismissal that deeply underestimates the power of symbols. Symbols don't just represent reality but can become tools to change it." | symbols | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 6e80607 | The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating Obama. It was thought by Obama and others that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump's genius was understanding that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapi.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4f93e1b | In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that Russian interference in the election could only succeed where "necessary conditions" and an "existing background" were present. In America that "existing background" was a persistent racism and the "necessary condition" was the symbolic threat of a black president. The two related factors hobbled America's ability to safeguard its electoral system." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 21f6fe5 | The historian David M. Oshinsky notes in his book "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice that from 1900 to 1930, African Americans in Mississippi "comprised about 67 percent of the killers in Mississippi and 80 percent of the victims." | Ta-Nehisi Coates |