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.
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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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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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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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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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Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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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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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
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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 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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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES