It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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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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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 President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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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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An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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Part 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 COATES