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Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular

Activists can’t persuade their contemporaries—they’re aiming at the next generation.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic on October 3, 2017
The Lost Cause Rides Again

The prospective series takes as its premise an ugly truth that black Americans are forced to live every day: What if the Confederacy wasn’t wholly defeated?

by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic on August 4, 2017
Hillary Clinton Goes Back to the Dunning School

How do you diagnose the problem of racism in America without understanding its actual history?

by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic on January 26, 2016
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Politicians are suddenly eager to disown failed policies on American prisons, but they have failed to reckon with the history.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic on September 15, 2015
When Malcolm X Met Robert Penn Warren

An excerpt from a discussion between Malcolm X and Robert Penn Warren on guilt and innocence.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic on August 28, 2015
What This Cruel War Was Over

The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic on June 22, 2015
The Case for Reparations

Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic on June 23, 2014

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Narratives of Freedom

In Coates's debut novel, he sets out to recover the struggles for emancipation that have been lost to the past.

by Elias Rodriques via The Nation on October 29, 2019

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Afro-Pessimist Temptation

An examination of the tragic echoes of Reconstruction-era politics following Obama's presidency.

by Darryl Pinckney via New York Review of Books on May 23, 2018

Between Obama and Coates

Because both thinkers neglect political economy, they end up promoting a politics that is responsible for the nation's growing inequality.

by Touré F. Reed via Catalyst on March 12, 2018

Coates and West in Jackson

America loves pitting black intellectuals against each other, but today's activists need both Coates and West.

by Robin D. G. Kelley via Boston Review on December 22, 2017

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Keeping the Faith

Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest book preaches political fatalism. But black activism has always believed in the possibility of change.

by Melvin L. Rogers via Boston Review on November 1, 2017

Idylls of the Liberal: The American Dreams of Mark Lilla and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Social change is made by commoners- who remain nameless in legends, and in the ideologies of Mark Lilla and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

by Asad Haider via Viewpoint Magazine on September 11, 2017

Race and the American Creed

Recovering black radicalism.

by Aziz Rana via n+1 on December 7, 2015

Photographic collage of James Baldwin

Bringing It Back to Baldwin

Joel Rhone reviews Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

by Joel Rhone via The Drift on October 21, 2020

What White Catholics Owe Black Americans

It's time to acknowledge that White Catholics’ American dream was built on profits plundered from black women, men, and children.

by Matthew J. Cressler via Slate on September 2, 2016

Elder M. Andrew Robinson-Gaither demonstrates for reparations for slavery.

The Thirteenth Amendment and a Reparations Program

The amendment, which brought an end to slavery in the U.S., could be used to begin a national debate on reparations.

by Ramsin Canon via U.S. Intellectual History Blog on July 12, 2014

A photograph of Billie Holiday singing.

The Perfectionist Tradition

The African American perfectionists offered “faith” instead of “hope”—emphasizing the struggle to realize a vision of justice.

by William P. Jones via Dissent on February 6, 2024

A picture of Huey Newton and Fredrika Newton embracing.

The Misunderstood Visionary Behind the Black Panther Party

Huey P. Newton has been mythologized and maligned since his murder 34 years ago. His family and friends offer an intimate look inside his life and mind.

by Jenny Rothenberg Gritz via Smithsonian on August 22, 2023

The sillhouette of a Civil War statue on a night sky.

The Spirit of Appomattox

Why is Shelby Foote's Civil War subject to so much contemporary debate?

by Jonathan Clarke via The Hedgehog Review on March 1, 2023

Redlining map from the 1930s

The Tyranny Of The Map: Rethinking Redlining

In trying to understand one of the key aspects of structural racism, have we constructed a new moralistic story that obscures more than it illuminates?

by Robert Gioielli via The Metropole on November 3, 2022

Redlining is Only Part of the Story

An annotated collection of resources from the Bunk archive that help explain the long history of housing discrimination.

by Julian Maxwell Hayter on October 5, 2022

Chains with ivy on it

Endowed by Slavery

Harvard made headlines by announcing that it would devote $100 million to remedying “the harms of the university’s ties to slavery.”

by Andrew Delbanco via New York Review of Books on June 2, 2022

Photograph from the Nuremberg trials. At center, a man in a suit is sitting down wearing a headset. Behind him are two guards for the trials.

What is Left of History?

Joan Scott’s "On the Judgment of History" asks us to imagine the past without the idea of progress. But what gets left out in the process?

by David A. Bell via The Nation on May 2, 2022

Illustration of “Twenty-eight fugitives escaping from the eastern shore of Maryland”

The Supernatural and the Mundane in Depictions of the Underground Railroad

Navigating the line between historical records and mystic imagery to understand the Underground Railroad.

by Andrew K. Diemer via The Panorama on April 4, 2022

Image of a 1970's band invoking the imagery of the Lost Cause and the Confederacy.

Whistlin' D ----.

Why songs of the southland are really northern.

by William Hogeland via Hogeland's Bad History on December 15, 2021

A row of large new suburban houses at sunset.

The Ongoing Toll of Segregation

Sheryll Cashin’s “White Space, Black Hood” shows how economic discrimination combines with racial injustice in America’s housing policy.

by Richard D. Kahlenburg via The New Republic on December 2, 2021

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