[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.
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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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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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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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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 COATES






