618 Quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fuck what you have heard or what you have seen in your son. He may lie about homework and laugh when the teacher calls home. He may curse his teacher, propose arson for the whole public system. But inside is the same sense that was in me. None of us ever want to fail. None of us want to be unworthy, to not measure up.

And by then, I well knew what would be done upon that land, how the sin of theft would be multiplied by the sin of bondage.

...the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slave holder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slave holder is patriotism á la carte.

For Americans, the hardest part of paying reparations would not be the outlay of money. It would be acknowledging that their most cherished myth was not real.

For that more ennobling narrative, as for much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.

Serious history was the West, and the West was white.

Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy.

To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.