You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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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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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.
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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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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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[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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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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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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When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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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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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
TA-NEHISI COATES