The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
TA-NEHISI COATESI 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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And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.
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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.
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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
TA-NEHISI COATES