[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 COATESWhen you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.
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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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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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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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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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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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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES