In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
TA-NEHISI COATESYou can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
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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 don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.
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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.
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They’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.
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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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