Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

As a city, we have to face the reality that New York's minority communities experience a disproportionate share of violent crime.

You have no understanding of what it is to live in a community surcharged with an idle, dissolute, vicious, ignorant negro population just emerged from slavery.

What does it amount to if the Black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law ... is to be subject to the [former] slaveholder's shotgun?

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Urban riots must now be recognized as a durable social phenomenon. They are a special form of violence ... mainly intended to shock the white community.

The Los Angeles riots were not caused by the Rodney King verdict. The Los Angeles riots were caused by rioters.

What hit me in the gut about hip-hop was that someone else grew up tough enough to be angry at the entire system.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

History simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.

I don't want any injustice brought against the bullies. Bullies just don't know any better. Anyone who is crying about police brutality or victimization as an adult needs to stop it and realize the privileges we have in this country.

I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

The Christian Democrats always made you feel like the poor relation.

Riots born out of political issues aren't the same as those born out of personal greed.

The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color.

Mandatory minimum sentencing has disproportionately affected blacks, Hispanics and others who often don't have the financial means to fight back.

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.

Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

This is a contest between the white man’s hope and black evil.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

All God’s dangers ain’t White men.