When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhen nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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Racism is, among other things.
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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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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.
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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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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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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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[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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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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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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I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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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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