Ta Quotes

When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done - he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad's voice - "Either I can beat him, or the police." Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn't. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

But this moment here when you speak as such to those who loved you when you was most frail, you gonna regret. Boy like you should be more careful with his words. Never know when they the last ones he might put upon a person. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello - which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

local 111.111.111.111 dev tun proto udp port 1194 ca /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ca.crt cert /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/SERVERNAME.crt # TBD - Change SERVERNAME to your Server name key /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/SERVERNAME.key # TBD - Change SERVERNAME to your Server name dh /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/dh1024.pem # TBD - Change if not using 2048 bit encryption server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 ifconfig 10.8.0.1 10.8.0.2 push "route 10.8.0.1 255.255.255.255" push "route 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0" push "route 111.111.111.111 255.255.255.0" push "dhcp-option DNS 222.222.222.222" push "redirect-gateway def1" client-to-client duplicate-cn keepalive 10 120 tls-auth /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ta.key 0 comp-lzo persist-key persist-tun user nobody group nogroup cipher AES-128-CBC log /var/log/openvpn.log status /var/log/openvpn-status.log 20 verb 1 Note: To paste in ~ Ira Finch

Ya game is fine, but ya booze-eyes are a problem. Not like ya ta drink this much. I reckon ya banjo'd, so ya are. ~ JoAnne Kenrick

I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses - certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Deception is parcel to ruling. I tell my enemies, my allies, and my subjects what they need to know, when I feel they need to know it. This philosophy tends to have some effects. A man cannot take it as his business to repeatedly deceive the world, without somehow deceiving himself. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Even the Dreamers, lost in their great reverie, feel it, for it's Billie they reach for in sadness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha the last sound they hear before dying. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can't, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this. To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing fields - the reduction of the black body - is no different than the premise that allowed for the murder of Prince Jones. The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

President Obama's friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama's previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a genocidal weight of whiteness. ~ George Gilder

People who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic - an orc, troll, or gorgon. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality - it's a double standard. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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 Darwinists, 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

I'm sitting in the bus station, minding my own business, reading 'Ta-Da!' magazine; a magazine by and for gay magicians, but that's a different story. ~ Dave Attell

People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

And watching this silently, as was my way, I marveled at the bonds between us-the way we shortened our words, or spoke, sometimes, with no words at all...an entire world of our own, hidden away from them, and to be part of that world, I felt even then, was to be in on a secret, a secret that was in you. ~ 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

Upon your feet you have ten toes, they look just like PO-TA-TOES! ~ Jeff Smith

But we were supposed to be exceptional." "Wakanda is exceptional, Baba. And now, more than ever, we need someone to remind us. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I unbuttoned my white shirt and reknotted it under by breasts. I felt like one of those circus 'quick change' acts – ta-dah, no more Wimpy Wendy, now we have Slinky Phee rising from the ashes. ~ Joss Stirling

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. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love the French language. I have sampled every language, French is my favourite - fantastic language, especially to curse with. Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connards d'enculé de ta mère... It's like wiping your arse with silk, I love it. ~ Lana Wachowski

Hm-m," he said. "Lookie, Ma. I been all day an' all night hidin' alone. Guess who
I been thinkin' about? Casy! He talked a lot. Used ta bother me. But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can remember-
all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn't even think I was listenin'. But I know now a fella ain't no good alone. ~ John Steinbeck

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. ~ 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

Thandiwe, when they come for you, do not scream. Do not plead. Do not cry, for your cries are but song to them. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? 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. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

On the last day of her visit I drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was her only child, as you are my only child, and having watched you grow I know that nothing could possibly be more precious to her. She said to me, "You take care of my daughter."
When she got out of the car my world had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you and then there was after and in this after you were the god I'd never had. I submitted before your needs and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Qui donc t'a donne la mission s'annoncer au peuple que la divinite n'existe pas? Quel avantage trouves-tu a persuader a l'homme qu'une force aveugle preside a ses destinees et frappe au hasard le crime et la vertu? (Who then invested you with the mission to announce to the people that there is no God? What advantage find you in persuading man that nothing but blind force presides over his destinies, and strikes haphazard both crime and virtue?) - ROBESPIERRE, "DISCOURS," MAI 7, 1794. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I was wrong. My enemy is not a beguiler, but a revealer. She brings out of us all the awful feelings that we have hidden away. And makes them manifest. So I know now that this is who I am. Might. Shame. Rage. And now they know, too. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. ~ James Thurber

To Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is 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

There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

For me, my writing benefits from my experience. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

In comics, you have to imagine what happens. I really loved it; I loved collecting. I loved following the adventures and figuring out what was going to happen next. I was a huge X-Men fan; I was a huge Spider-Man fan, and, to large degree, I remain one. It's literature for me; it's art. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Serious history was the West, and the West was white. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

So that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined - with Eric Garner's anger, with Trayvon Martin's mythical words ("You are gonna die tonight"), with Sean Bell's mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys...loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I learned this living among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-ta?" she asked Jack, once Jessica was out of earshot. "I can't believe you went out with a woman who uses that interjection."
"I can't believe I'm 'going out' with a woman who uses the word 'interjection. ~ Jennifer Shirk

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate - the kind that HR 40 proposes - we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion - and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper - America's heritage, history, and standing in the world. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

But that is the point of white supremacy--to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (and particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You are my Muse..."
~I Belong to You (Mon Coeur S'Ouvre A Ta Voix) ~ Matthew J. Bellamy

Love doesn't mean anything if you are not willing ta make a commitment ~ Nicholas Sparks

We come, we come with roll of drum: ta-runda runda runda rom!

We come, we come with horn and drum: ta-rūna rūna rūna rom!

To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone;
Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone,
We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door;
For bole and bough are burning now, the furnace roars-we go to war!
To land of gloom with tramp of doom, with roll of drum, we come, we come;
To Isengard with doom we come!
With doom we come, with doom we come! ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I do not claim to have loved Sophia then, though I thought I did. I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It was the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant-a clause in the deed forbidding sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don't want ta hear that kinda dirty talk comin' from you."
"What, fanny? Fanny fanny fanny! ~ Kami Garcia

The guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language - violence. And I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

My parents were two-faced. To me, they showed no mercy. They preached from theBook of Fallen Children - Commandment 1: The Child Is Always Ungrateful. At eighteen, the free ride would stop, and I'd be dumped into the mess of the world. But in their private moments, they were soft, cowed by love. They critiqued their own parenting skills and thought of all the ways the could help their kids get ahead. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I've thought of myself a girl on several occasions because I like to polish shoes and find household tasks amusing. There was once even a time when I insisted on mending a torn suit with my own hands. And in winter I always light the heating stoves myself, as though this were the natural course of things. But of course I'm not a real girl. Please give me a moment to consider all this would entail. The first thing that comes to mind is the question of whether I might possibly be a girl has never, never, not for a single moment, troubled me, rattled my bourgeois composure or made me unhappy. An absolutely by no means unhappy person stands before you, I'd like to put quite special emphasis on this, for I have never experienced sexual torment or distress, for I was never at a loss for quite simple methods of freeing myself from pressures. A rather curious, that is to say, important discovery for me was that it filled me with the most delightful gaiety to imagine myself someone's servant.... My nature, then, merely inclines me to treat people well, to be helpful and so forth. Not long ago I carried with flabbergasting zeal a shopping bag full of new potatoes for a petit bourgeoise. She's have been perfectly able to tote it herself. Now my situation is this: my particular nature also sometimes seeks, I've discovered, a mother, a teacher, that is, to express myself better, an unapproachable entity, a sort of goddess. At times I find the goddess in an instant, whereas at others it ta ~ Robert Walser

This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways. A little girl wanders home, at age seven, after being teased in school and asks her parents, "Are we niggers and what does this mean? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Khalepa ta kala, greek. It means 'beauty is harsh'. ~ Cassandra Clare

Hear him now as he toils. He has a long garden-implement in his hand, and he is sending up the death-rate in slug circles with a devastating rapidity. "Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay Ta-ra-ra BOOM - " And the boom is a death-knell. As it rings softly out on the pleasant spring air, another stout slug has made the Great Change. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. - Ta ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I could have
you arrested!" Which is to
say: "I could take your
body. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. "Keep my name out your mouth," they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was raised on the struggle of elders - iron collars, severed feet, the rifle of dirty Harriet, and down through the years, the Muslims and regal Malcolm. But mostly what I saw around me was rank dishonor: cable and Atari plugged into every room, juvenile parenting, niggers sporting kicks with price tags that looked like mortgage bills. The Conscious among us knew the whole race was going down, that we'd freed ourselves from slavery and Jim Crow but not the great shackling of minds. The hoppers had no picture of the larger world. We thought all our battles were homegrown and personal, but, like an evil breeze at our back, we felt invisible hands at work, like someone else was still tugging at levers and pulling strings. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I'd want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly. It occurred to me that I really was in someone else's country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ant Prune was holding one of the squirrels in her hand. 'And once a day, we have ta clean their little private parts with a Q-tip, so they'll learn ta clean themselves.'
That was a visual I didn't need ~ Margaret Stohl

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

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

If you're black, you were born in jail, Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home from school, in my lack of control over my body. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Dad called it "enlightenment" but to me, it just felt lonely. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. 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

Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful - the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. And this is not reducible to just you - the women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you never will know. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from 'restrictive covenants' to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates