All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
TA-NEHISI COATES
I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
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When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.
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[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
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This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.
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I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.
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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.
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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
TA-NEHISI COATES