A Black church that isn't inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.

— Darnell Lamont Walker

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

— Colson Whitehead

And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now—my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually plucked me from the sea.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time

— Nicole Mones

Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved.

— John Marshall Harlan

By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew—and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. Furthermore, I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. Furthermore, I like to think this, but I can’t promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

Calling out the supposed ‘abuse’ of welfare by blacks and other people of color is a time-honored tactic for distracting the public from actual national issue. It also taps into latent, subconscious racism, which is what right-wing politicians would call a ‘win-win.

— Justin Simien

Dealing with pain for surviving on this thirsty concrete

— Kjiva

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.

— Aberjhani