If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
TA-NEHISI COATESI am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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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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[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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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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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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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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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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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 COATES






