Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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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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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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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.
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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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And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.
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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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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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[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.
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You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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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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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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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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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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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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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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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