Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
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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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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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.
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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 greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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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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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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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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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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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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Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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