The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
TA-NEHISI COATESTalk about class and hope no one notices.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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 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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What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.
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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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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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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
TA-NEHISI COATES