Home/Recent kwiples > People >

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Thursday 2nd of October 2025

2016 Presidential election Most white  working-class people voted for Donald Trump and the through line that you find is whiteness, not class and not gender. It's not like he only got men; he got a majority of white women too. So if you look at categories of white people you find Trump being dominant among them, in part because of the appeal he made, but also in part because the Republican Party has effectively become in this country the party of white people. Ta-Nehisi Coates © 2017 Kwiple.com
v
Books  Books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that that only the reader can see. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message © 2024 Kwiple.com
Politics  You don't raise the kind of looming statues [of white supremacists] I saw at the State House [of South Carolina] just for the hell of it. Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message © 2024 Kwiple.com
Public discourse I don't really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of viiew,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views — the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of the mind behind those sentences. It is this last that I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message © 2024 Kwiple.com
Race But race is the child of racism, not the father.  … Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me © 2016 Kwiple.com
Racism There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me © 2016 Kwiple.com
Selfie All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls “to be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me © 2016 Kwiple.com
Selfie I have often wondered how I missed the coming tragedy. It is not so much that I should have predicted that Americans would elect Donald Trump. It's just that I shouldn't have put it past us. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Guardian, September 29, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie 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. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me © 2016 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Trump truly is something new – the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific – America's first white president. Donald Trump portrayed by Ta-Nehisi Coates © 2020 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Trump's legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. Donald Trump portrayed by Ta-Nehisi Coates © 2020 Kwiple.com
 
Zionism Zionism demands, as Levi Eskol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, ”the dowry, not the bride” — that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on it. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message © 2024 Kwiple.com