To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
TA-NEHISI COATESTalk about class and hope no one notices.
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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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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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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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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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 think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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I think there’s a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that’s not really it.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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