[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
TA-NEHISI COATESIt was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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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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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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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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.
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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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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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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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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
TA-NEHISI COATES