If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
TA-NEHISI COATESIt 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
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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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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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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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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
TA-NEHISI COATES