What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
TA-NEHISI COATESReparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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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.
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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.
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I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .
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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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I think there’s a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that’s not really it.
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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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They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
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Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.
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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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