Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as they regard African-Americans. Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth30 September 1975
CountryUnited States of 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.
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.
There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position.
Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.
People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time.
There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that.
The president of the United States is not a king. You know? Barack Obama was elected by the American people.
When you write, you're inside the project. You can't really think about the reception. It has to be worth it even if no one reads it.
We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.
I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.
I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.
I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.'