Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
TA-NEHISI COATESYou know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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.
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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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More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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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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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
TA-NEHISI COATES