Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
TA-NEHISI COATESI think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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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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[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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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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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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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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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.
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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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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white 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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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 was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.
TA-NEHISI COATES