Quotes from Ta-Nehisi Coates

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

I've been very, very careful to tell people what I am qualified to talk about and what I'm not qualified to talk about.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

You had eight years before President Trump, a situation where the opposition party basically ran in opposition to the president on a platform of thinly based racism. That doesn't mean that the politicians themselves were outright racist, but when charges of birtherism came up, no one repudiated it.

I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad.

We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.

I wasn't the biggest Captain America fan, but increasingly, I see him as a great character. Winter Soldier really got into what it meant to actually represent America.

My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission.

Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church.

You don't actually have control of the position people want you to be in. If they say, 'You king of the blacks,' you're king of the blacks - whether you like it or not.

I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed.

Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows - and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere.

Fighting, I guess, was never the real reason I read comic books as a kid. The fighting was an important part, an integral part of it; I don't know I would've read it without it.

White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers.

One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.

I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, and I would cut on the TV, and I would watch a show like 'The Wonder Years,' or I would watch, you know, some other show like 'Family Ties.'

There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.

I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.

If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works.

Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that's a statement.

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.

I started writing regularly for 'The Atlantic' roughly around the time that Barack Obama got inaugurated.

I get really, really concerned when I see somebody, taking $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, will not release what they're actually saying. That's concerning.