Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
TA-NEHISI COATESAny time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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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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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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[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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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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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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Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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