With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
TA-NEHISI COATESAddressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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.
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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 think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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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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You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
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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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Racism is, among other things.
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