[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.
TA-NEHISI COATESJust because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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 the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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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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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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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This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.
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An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
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Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
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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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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
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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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They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.
TA-NEHISI COATES