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 COATESTo prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
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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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[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.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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 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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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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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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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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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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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.
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The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.
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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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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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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.
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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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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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