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.
TA-NEHISI COATESHumans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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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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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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I mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.
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More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
TA-NEHISI COATES