To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
TA-NEHISI COATESI did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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 mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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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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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
TA-NEHISI COATES