A Quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates
When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.
Related Quotes
Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.
So many of us don't know what we want; we just know we don't want what we have. We spend 99% of the time talking about how bad it is, but only 1% of the time talking about how we can do something about it.
I hate to force anything. A lot of people say that comedy is twenty percent truth, and eighty percent fallacy. I believe that you have to have lived through something to write about it.
Growing up in Augusta in such a protected and loving community is something that I really enjoy talking about. I love talking about - even though I grew up, of course, in the time of segregated schools: Brown vs. Board of Education came along after I was already in first grade.
The idea of 'talking white,' a lot of people grew up around that, just the idea that if you speak with proper diction and come off as educated that it's not black and that it's actually anti-black and should be considered only something that white people would do.
Actors are not a great breed of people, I don't think. I count myself as something of an exception. I grew up in the theater, and my values were about the work, and not being a star or anything like that. I'm not spoiled in that way, and if I fight for something, it's about the work, not about how big my trailer is.
There is something fundamentally wrong about the way we [americans] are moving as a country, when billionaires are able to buy elections as a result of Citizens United. There`s something fundamentally wrong when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent.
If they're not talking about you, you're not doing something; you're not doing anything. So if they're talking about you, you may be doing something right. And when they talk bad about you, you just use it for motivation.
Oftentimes, it feels like we spend so much of our life waiting to make art, waiting for somebody to let us do something. You don't really have to do that. You can make it all the time. And 99 percent of the time, it's not going to be a big deal on a global scale. But 100 percent of the time, it's going to make you feel amazing.
So many times after a catastrophe like 9/11, Estonia in Sweden, the Holocaust or whatever, we are so fond of lifting up the hero examples, but actually 99 percent of survivors have done something that they feel very guilty about.
Risk is to do something that 99 percent of the time would be a failure.
I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too.
As white people in this society, we are socialized from the time that we're born to see ourselves as superior, to see white people and things associated white people as superior. At the same time, I'm encouraged to never admit to that. I'm taught that racism is very bad and immoral.
When we mention the 1 percent and the 99 percent, everybody now knows what we are talking about. It's part of our vocabulary. How quickly these numbers jumped from the sidelines to the center.
As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent - and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening years, I moved into the 1 percent.
It sounds so innocuous but the difference between 99 percent and 100 percent is huge. You can finish at 99 percent and you'll be hurting but if you push a tiny bit more - and that's the bit that makes the difference to your training - your legs just grind to a halt. It's like your engine is seizing up.
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