The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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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[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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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I 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.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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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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I 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.
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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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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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