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.
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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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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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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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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An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
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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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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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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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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 think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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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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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
TA-NEHISI COATES