Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
TA-NEHISI COATESIt was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
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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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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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 progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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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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[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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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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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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.
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Reparations 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.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
TA-NEHISI COATES