Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
TA-NEHISI COATESNever forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
TA-NEHISI COATESIt was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
TA-NEHISI COATESI am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
TA-NEHISI COATESTwo hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
TA-NEHISI COATESGiving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
TA-NEHISI COATESThat’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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
TA-NEHISI COATESThirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
TA-NEHISI COATESHumans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
TA-NEHISI COATESBetter you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhen you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
TA-NEHISI COATESThese were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
TA-NEHISI COATESI think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhat I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
TA-NEHISI COATESThey’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.
TA-NEHISI COATES