That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.
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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All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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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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Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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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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You 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.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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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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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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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[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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