The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe essence of American racism is disrespect.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.
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I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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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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I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .
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I mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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 nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
TA-NEHISI COATES