Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
TA-NEHISI COATESSegregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Racism is, among other things.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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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[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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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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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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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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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[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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
TA-NEHISI COATES