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.
TA-NEHISI COATESTwo hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
-
-
I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
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.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
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.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
Talk about class and hope no one notices.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
TA-NEHISI COATES