What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
TA-NEHISI COATESYou don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.
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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.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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.
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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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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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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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What 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 COATES






