When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
TA-NEHISI COATESI 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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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Racism is, among other things.
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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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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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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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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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When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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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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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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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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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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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
TA-NEHISI COATES