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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore—not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-’90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jun 24 2009, 10:00 AM ET Comment

Even, as I read over that post, I keep trying to get into the head of the other side. It's a sick impulse in me. The picture from yesterday's post is cropped from a larger portrait of USCT soldiers. I've made it the wallpaper on my PC here at home.

Anyway, I was looking at the picture wondering what it must have been to be a white supremacists, to truly believe the mythology, and see these guys charging at you with guns. What was that like? Was it like watching a dog talk? Or was it all a self-serving lie? Did they never really believe blacks were inhuman, that they would not fight?

American history, to its credit, instance after instance of watching white supremacy defeated. At those moments, I wonder how it felt. To see Jack Johnson take out White Hope after White Hope, to watch King and bunch of students destroy segregation, to see Obama now...

Nothing in my experience, or my reading, says that black people ever fully bought into the notions of subhumanity. But for people who truly believe, what does it feel like? Or do they never believe at all? Any recovering white supremacists out there who wanna talk?


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