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 COATESWhat 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.
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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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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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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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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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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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
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The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
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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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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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