{"author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates","total_quotes":105,"quotes":[{"text":"One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness—the black gangster, the black rioter—that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["affirmative-action","american-myths","birtherism","black-respectability","good-negro-government","racism","ta-nehisi-coates"],"id":307,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["african-americans","blacks","discomfort","education","learning","race-relations","racism"],"id":356,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["justice","racism","long "],"id":753,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now—my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually plucked me from the sea.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["african-americans","curiosity","frustration","perseverance","resilience","struggle"],"id":2267,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"I have raised you to respect every human being as singular. And you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings as vast as your own, who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddys in the nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks to loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress making, and knows inside herself that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. Slavery is the same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and describes this world in essential texts. A world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave. Hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave.And when this woman peers back into the generations, all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren, but when she dies, the world, which is really the only world she can really know, ends. For this woman enslavement is not a parable, it is damnation, it is the never ending night, and the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains, whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["african-american","black","history","race","slavery"],"id":23829,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can’t, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["african-americans","barack-obama","blacks","equality","politics","potus","presidents","race-relations"],"id":35904,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["books","education","libraries"],"id":38500,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["black-lives-matter","criminals","direction","juvenile-delinquency","juvenile-justice-system","opportunity","poverty","single-parenting"],"id":38867,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others...","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["contemporary-racism","empathy","empathy-diversity","empathy-psychology","prejudice","racism","skepticism"],"id":49904,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can't prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.' Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn't preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["african-american-culture","african-american-norms","black-culture","employment","racism","structural-inequality"],"id":50388,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":105,"pages":11,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}