[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.
TA-NEHISI COATESAn 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there’s some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and a level of shame.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES