Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

The great white advantage has been living inside history, adapting to its constant demands, nurturing the values and the habits of life that allow one to keep pace. This is the cultural capital that whites too often take for granted and rarely think of insisting on in the former victims of exclusion.

I was born on an island with 96 percent of the people black. But all the power and the economy was in the hands of white people who only formed four per cent.

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

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

dominating populations suppress the history of their victims, destroy the practice of the culture of their victims, prevent the victims from coming to understand themselves as a part of a cultural family, teach systematically the ideology of white supremacy, control the socialization process, control the accumulation of wealth, and perform segregation and apartheid.

The default of our society is the reproduction of racial inequality. I mean, that's what it does; that's what it's been doing for hundreds of years.

The general interest both of the white man and of the negroes requires that he should be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible’

Whites don’t like to see the nigger with too much … White people was afraid that money will make the nigger act like his own man.

America isn't made for the black man.

There are all kinds of ways in which especially white men in this country have been helped by the government.

While individual whites may be against racism, they still benefit from the distribution of resources controlled by their group.

In the U.S., while individual whites might be against racism, they still benefit from their group's control. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won't be one of them.

But black people fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about law breakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.

Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.

White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn't demand the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn't demand that somebody be in place driving.

American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

The White man pays Reverend Martin Luther King so that Martin Luther King can keep the Negro defenseless.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.