Ta-Nehisi Coates Zitate – Sprüche auf Englisch mit Übersetzung

Zitat des Tages von Ta-Nehisi Coates:

As a writer, I was shaped by a desire to write for black people. That things were not being represented. That was my motivating force. That it has become what it has become is shocking to me. I just wanted to be able to take care of my kids.

I guess I'd be put in the ID politics camp. But there is really nothing in the world-view of, say, Bernie Sanders I actually disagree with. I'd like a guaranteed income, single-payer health care, a stronger safety net, etc. The problem is the temptation to paper over historically fraught issues to achieve that is tempting.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

When you know that people know who you are, you are always working - and not the work you want to do. You are sort of performing, because you know they are looking - or at least glancing - at you.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I write what I write in the way that I write it. I'm not being abstract, you know. I'm talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Donald Trump begins his political career in birtherism. That idea is connected to a very, very old notion that African-Americans are not citizens.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Typically, there's this perspective among writers - and black writers: there's this idea that there is one person - and maybe beyond writers - among blacks, there is always one person who everyone should go to learn about all things black.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

There is some group of Americans who are really, really curious to understand how we ended up at this point, where every week it seems like you can turn on your TV and see some sort of abuse being heaped on black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The thing people have to remember is there's nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this historically. We can look at 1619, when Africans first came here, and how early African slaves intermixed pretty indiscriminately with indentured white servants.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

In comics, you have to imagine what happens. I really loved it; I loved collecting. I loved following the adventures and figuring out what was going to happen next. I was a huge X-Men fan; I was a huge Spider-Man fan, and, to large degree, I remain one. It's literature for me; it's art.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I feel some need to represent where I'm from. But ultimately, I think my only real responsibility is to - as much as possible - interrogate my own truths. This is to say not merely writing what I think is true, but using the writing to turn that alleged truth over and over, to stress-test it, in the aim of producing something readable.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. And many of those folks also, at the very least, gave land to African Americans when they were liberated.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

People review my comic books. People review every article I write - 'The Atlantic' even publishes them. A great deal of the critique of 'Between the World and Me' was from a feminist perspective. bell hooks pushed back, among others. Some of that has value. Some of it does not. I try my best to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

People sort of went crazy when 'BTWAM' came out. I'm happy a bunch of people read it. I'm happy it touched so many people. I'm less happy that it became an object for certain folks or was discussed that way. I'm less happy that journalists started scrolling through my kid's Instagram account.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's kind of selfish to say that you're only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Donald Trump did not appear by magic.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Like a lot of people, I'm very, very concerned about Senator Clinton's record. I'm very, very concerned about where her positions were in the 1990s, when we had some of the most disgusting legislation in terms of our criminal justice, really, in this country's history.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

American myths have never been colorless.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Racism is a physical experience.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates