Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
TA-NEHISI COATESThey’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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.
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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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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
TA-NEHISI COATES