Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.

I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.

Blacks—across the economic and ideological spectrum—often feel astonishingly vulnerable, of accusations of disloyalty to race.

We [American Blacks] are a nation within a nation, looking for a nationality

I love telling the experience of a black male in America, but modern, not always having to go back to a period piece to remind people where we come from. It's more a modern sense of where we are today and where we want to go in the future. So I try to choose projects somewhere around that space.

Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.

And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.

I'm not trying to disrespect anybody by saying this - I'm not sure I feel any interaction with Asian America in any collective sense. - It's like, when you're telling me this right now, my reaction is, Really? Asian America knows about me?

Like any group that has endured much, African Americans have created a strong and mutually reinforcing sense of group identity. That's not a bad thing in and of itself.

We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

All my skin folk are not my kin folk.

What after all am I. Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates black and white in America.

My blood's not red or blue - it's brown.

I want everybody to understand that I am an American Negro first before I am a member of any political party.

Blackness is not a monolith. We are not homogenous people; we are not all the same.

Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed background to challenge our authority to speak.

I have to show off my struggle so that people accept that I'm black. No matter that every single room I go to, I'm usually the darkest person there... I kind of resent that mentality. I'm just an individual.

My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.

I am more than a black guy. I am a person, I'm storyteller, I'm a son, I'm a friend, so I am all those things, so it is frustrating, to a degree, to be limited by other people's perceptions of me, but at the same time, it is true that I am a black guy, and, you know, it's like I'm rooted in but not bound by.

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor. In some places, you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive.

You always want what you can't have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.

I'm not going to be one of those people who says, 'I'm a showrunner; I'm not a black showrunner.' I'm black when I go to sleep. I'm black when I wake up, period. It doesn't affect my perspective on everything, but at the same time, it's who I am, and I'm proud of it.

Black folk who don't realize I'm mixed will treat me like I'm some racist person, or when white people find out I'm black, they treat me with racism, and I don't feel like I belong or fit in anywhere.

There are several different traits that make up a person's identity. For me, being Vietnamese American is the entirety of who I am.

If you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there.