To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
TA-NEHISI COATESYou 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES