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.
TA-NEHISI COATESRacism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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[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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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
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What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
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Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
TA-NEHISI COATES