Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Time Men Years

If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Work You Works

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Men Youth You

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Anger Wit Who

My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Peace Your You

I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

White Understand UN

When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Years Year Who

The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Art Age Violence

Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that's a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

War Time Men

We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Art You Want

I think it's really important to be conscious of yourself and the world around you. For me, that meant reading a lot and reporting.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yourself Yours Your

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Power White Us

I don't want them to read what I'm writing and say, 'I think that's right,' and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Writing Wit Way

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Men History Us

I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yin Would Which

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Power Car Wing

If you are attempting to study American history, and you don't understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Men History You

It's kind of selfish to say that you're only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

You Will Victory

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

War Sad Art

You can't tolerate anybody attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with force.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Your Body Your You

Like a lot of people, I'm very, very concerned about Senator Clinton's record. I'm very, very concerned about where her positions were in the 1990s, when we had some of the most disgusting legislation in terms of our criminal justice, really, in this country's history.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

History Where Were

In the 1930s and the 1940s, we set up the FHA. We set up the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. We set up specific bureaus to make our communities look the way they look.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.'

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I wasn't the biggest Captain America fan, but increasingly, I see him as a great character. Winter Soldier really got into what it meant to actually represent America.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Racism is a physical experience.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me - but the process of actually crafting it is essential.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

From last century's 'The Birth of a Nation' to this century's 'Gods and Generals,' Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War and, thus, modern America's very origins.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

When you know that people know who you are, you are always working - and not the work you want to do. You are sort of performing, because you know they are looking - or at least glancing - at you.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I never expected my writing to become as popular as it did.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The FHA literally drew up the redlining map and then basically distributed - I'm sorry, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation actually did it, and then distributed to banks who used that as policy to determine how they would lend and who they would lend to. The racism in the system was pervasive and total.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

For me, my writing benefits from my experience.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

There is some group of Americans who are really, really curious to understand how we ended up at this point, where every week it seems like you can turn on your TV and see some sort of abuse being heaped on black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The symbolic power of Barack Obama's presidency - that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons taking up residence in the castle - assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am always surprised people are surprised that people haven't read things.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

We look at young black kids with a scowl on their face, walking a certain way down the block with their sweatpants dangling, however, with their hoodies on. And folks think that this is a show of power or a show of force. But I know, because I've been among those kids, it ultimately is fear.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates