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.
TA-NEHISI COATESI think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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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.
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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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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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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
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[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.
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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES