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.
TA-NEHISI COATESAny time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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 would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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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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’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.
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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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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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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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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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[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.
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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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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES