When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhen you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
TA-NEHISI COATESNever forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
TA-NEHISI COATESRacism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
TA-NEHISI COATESAnd they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
TA-NEHISI COATESPart of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe essence of American racism is disrespect.
TA-NEHISI COATESIt was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
TA-NEHISI COATES[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.
TA-NEHISI COATESI 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.
TA-NEHISI COATESI mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.
TA-NEHISI COATESI’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.
TA-NEHISI COATESNever forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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.
TA-NEHISI COATES[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.
TA-NEHISI COATESThirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
TA-NEHISI COATESI think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
TA-NEHISI COATES