From the day we touched these stolen shores, he'd explain to anyone who'd listen, they infected our minds. They deployed their phrenologists, their backward Darwinist's, and forged a false Knowledge to keep us down. But against this demonology, there were those who battled back. Universities scorned them. Compromised professors scoffed at their names. So they published themselves and hawked their Knowledge at street fairs, churches, and bazaars. For their efforts, they were forgotten. Their great works languished out of print, while those they sought to save grew fat on integration and amnesia.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: 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

I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practice poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I do not believe we can stop them, Satori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers this planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don’t so much hope that any reader “agrees” with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates