What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
TA-NEHISI COATESI 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 .
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Racism is, among other things.
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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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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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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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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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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’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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Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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