The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
TA-NEHISI COATESTo prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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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 progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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