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 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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[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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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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.
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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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[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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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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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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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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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.
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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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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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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.
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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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[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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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