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.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe essence of American racism is disrespect.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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 think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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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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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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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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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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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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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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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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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Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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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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What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES