Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
TA-NEHISI COATESBetter you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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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.
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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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