Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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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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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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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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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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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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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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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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.
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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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Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our 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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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
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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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.
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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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[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.
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My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.
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I think there’s a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that’s not really it.
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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
TA-NEHISI COATES