It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.
TA-NEHISI COATESI would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
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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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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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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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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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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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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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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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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
TA-NEHISI COATES