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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

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Famous Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

“One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slave holder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slave holder is patriotism á la carte.”

RacismSlaveryPatriotismRacism In AmericaReparationsSlavery In The United States
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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“Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.”

WealthAmerican HistoryBlack HistoryWealth CreationUs HistoryWhitenessReparationsWealth ManagementInstitutionalized RacismWealth GapWhite Guilt
Book:Un conto ancora aperto
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“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.”

American HistoryBlack HistoryUs HistoryKleptocracyInstitutional OppressionInstitutionalized RacismLand Ownership2001Slave Economy
Book:Un conto ancora aperto
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“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 tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy.”

Fairy TalesMythsMagaMake America Great AgainRevisionist HistoryBill CosbyCultural MythsPound Cake Speech
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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“Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that Blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew... I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned?”

RaceRace RelationsRace In America
Book:Between the World and Me
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“Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, 'intend' for you is secondary… 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.”

RaceRace RelationsRace In America
Book:Between the World and Me
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“In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott. But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road -- becoming ourselves.”

MinoritiesBlack PeopleRace In AmericaBilingualismBicultural
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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“An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. 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.”

BooksQuestioning BeliefsQuestioning AuthorityPolitical Consciousness
Book:Between the World and Me
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“We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past--at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge --that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.”

AmericaRaceHistoryDemocracyRacismAfrican AmericansWhite SupremacyReparations
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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“And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckon us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history”

Reparations
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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“It may seem strange that people who have already obtained a position of power through violence, invest so much time into justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings, whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves, and those they seek to throttle and rob.”

SlaveryNarrativesSystems Of Oppression
Book:The Message
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“There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can't prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.' Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn't preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions.”

RacismEmploymentBlack CultureAfrican American CultureStructural InequalityAfrican American Norms
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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“Mais une société qui en protège certains par un filet invisible d'écoles, d'emprunts immobiliers subventionnés, de richesses accumulées, et ne consent à t'offrir que la protection d'une justice criminelle, cette société là a échoué dans la mise en pratique de ses bonnes intentions - à moins qu'elle n'ait réussi à imposer quelque chose de bien plus sombre. Quel que soit le nom qu'on donne à ce système, il n'a eu qu'un seul résultat: notre infirmité face aux forces criminelles à l'oeuvre dans ce monde. Que l'agent de ces forces soit blanc ou noir n'a aucune importance- ce qui en a en revanche c'est notre condition; c'est le système qui fait de ton corps un objet destructible.”

UsRacisme
Book:Between the World and Me
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“J'ai commencé à comprendre que le but de mon éducation était une forme d'inconfort, un processus qui n'était pas destiné à me récompenser avec mon propre Rêve personnel mais qui, au contraire, devait briser tous les rêves, tous les mythes réconfortants de l'Afrique, de l'Amérique, de toutes les parties du monde, pour me laisser face à l'humanité dans ce qu'elle a de plus terrible.”

IllusionsRacismeéDucation
Book:Between the World and Me
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“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”

SlaveryWhitenessAbolitionists
Book:The Water Dancer
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“There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the Sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that very racism, pinned into ghettoes, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born. And so we struggle out of fear for our children. We struggle out of fear for ourselves. We struggle to avoid our feelings, because to actually consider all that was taken, to understand that it was taken systematically, that the taking is essential to America and echoes down through the ages, could make you crazy.”

American HistoryAfrican AmericansSystematic RacismStruggle Against Racism
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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