What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
TA-NEHISI COATESI am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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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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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
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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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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
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I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
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[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES