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Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

Total quotes: 7
“Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson–not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Tagged: Life
“There exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Tagged: Media Control, Don't Question
“The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Tagged: Police, The Problem with Police
“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 moral standard.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Tagged: Moral Standards, American Exceptionalism
“Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations
Tagged: racism, America, Black Lives Matter, black lives, Matter, Police Brutality, Violence, Chance, Progress
“White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Tagged: White America, Lynching, racism
“But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible— this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Tagged: Race, racism
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