The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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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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[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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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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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[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
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