[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.
TA-NEHISI COATESI would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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[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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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 did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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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 unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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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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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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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 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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It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.
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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 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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This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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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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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
TA-NEHISI COATES