I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
TA-NEHISI COATESTalk about class and hope no one notices.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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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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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
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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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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES