I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
TA-NEHISI COATESI think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.
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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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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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 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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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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[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
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It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.
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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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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES