Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

It's the whole white-supremacist movement, no matter what they call themselves - be it Klan, Nazis, alt-right, skinheads - the basic ideology is the same. They consider themselves superior to others because of their white skin, and we should not sleep on that.

The white race must be supreme, not only in America but in the world.

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.

A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind - the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy.

White supremacy is not confined to strange men in the Deep South who put on white cloaks, it is not confined to strange gatherings of the English Defence League.

For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Invisible Empire

With George Bush's policies, I could make an argument for how they affect black people in a negative way. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't argue that he's a white supremacist.

I wouldn't argue that Mitt Romney is a white supremacist.

The unfortunate reality is the alt-right has captured white people's imagination.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

The alt-right has become about white identity politics. Obviously I'm not a white-identitarian, so the alt-right can do their thing.

Have the colored people done anything to justify the prejudice against them that does exist in the hearts of so many white persons and, generally, of one great political party in this country? Have they done anything to justify it? No, sir.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.

Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist…. He was the first Southerner to become President after the Civil War…. He loved Birth of a Nation … He was able to fire many African Americans in the government and to stop hiring them…. In terms of race, he represents the very worst in terms of qualities and prejudices.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

We're not so much anti-black as we are pro-white.

The American paradigm of race requires that there be an ‘other’ - and the other is Black people. That's what makes white people, white.

The doublespeak of the American neoconservatives who conjured up the term "reverse racism" (was) to attack those who fought against White supremacy. This so-called ‘colorblind’ ideology has reversed the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and is actually commonsense among White Americans. It informs policymakers from the White House to the Supreme Court and has been used to justify the retreat from egalitarianism.

Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of anti-black vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, bored young men, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.

There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

It is time to reclaim this country for white people. If you want it, you’re going to have to get it the way the founding fathers got it — blood, blood, blood.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.