Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

As a black man, so often you grow up suppressing your emotions and sensitivity.

When you're a young black man, you're not allowed to be emotional. One of the reasons I act is people pay me to be emotional.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

I understand we love to talk about black girl magic, but sometimes that is a term that allows people to put us in this character like we're not real people that feel real things.

There are hundreds of stories I've heard from black women from my generation, generations before me, and the next, that have never been given an opportunity to fulfill their dreams.

I feel like we haven't dealt with the ghosts of America's past, and the way to deal with it is to confront it, so every time people see me, I want them to be reminded and to confront that ghost.

I was taught you don't tell your secrets to strangers - certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

I don't expect anyone who doesn't look like me to fix my problems.

I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.

Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves.

As a black person, I'm used to going to places in which I might be the only black person that shows up there. This experience has an effect on the way you see yourself in the world and what it means to be black in the world.

The most moving parts of 'Real American' come when Lythcott-Haims stares unflinchingly at her own self-loathing, writing about the racist encounters of her childhood that convinced her from a young age that there was something inherently wrong with being black.

In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.

If you are born black, and you don't accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.

I wasn't an Uncle Tom and I never was gonna be.

We're poor black kids from Akron, Ohio. When you tell stories about people like us, sometimes it's going to be considered a social-impact story.

I came from a privileged background, which I am entirely grateful for, but it played a part in my feeling that I couldn't complain about my own emotions.

I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone who's told me that the story of 'Roots' isn't important.

I think that brown people are attracted to rock music because it speaks on the spectrum of pain that brown people are predisposed to.

I know black kids who don't even know any other black kids except their cousins. And that's enough. You wouldn't look at these kids and say that they are Uncle Toms or self-hating or fleeing or trying to be white, given the culture in which they live, which is very natural to them as kids.

Black people have to define who we are, or others do it for us.

As a black woman, I feel like I have a unique experience that we don't often see in media portrayals of the South.

At first, I didn't even realize how low on the totem pole I am. First of all, I'm a woman. Second of all, I'm of color. Third of all, I'm queer.