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.
TA-NEHISI COATES[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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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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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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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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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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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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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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
TA-NEHISI COATES