Quotes from Ta-Nehisi Coates

We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that.

If your response to the first black president is to say they weren't born in this country... you might be a white supremacist.

In the 1930s and the 1940s, we set up the FHA. We set up the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. We set up specific bureaus to make our communities look the way they look.

It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.

When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.

The president of the United States is not a king. You know? Barack Obama was elected by the American people.

I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake.

We look at young black kids with a scowl on their face, walking a certain way down the block with their sweatpants dangling, however, with their hoodies on. And folks think that this is a show of power or a show of force. But I know, because I've been among those kids, it ultimately is fear.

For me, my writing benefits from my experience.

I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.

Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that's a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time.

Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe.

My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.'

If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.

Abraham Lincoln was killed by the forces of white supremacy.

If you are attempting to study American history, and you don't understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America.

White supremacy is a very, very popular and trenchant belief in this country's history and heritage.

I am always surprised people are surprised that people haven't read things.

When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.

When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything.

Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.

You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere.

What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It's the weight on our shoulders. That is what's actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it's just a few idiots. Isn't. It's the country.