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.
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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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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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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
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What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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The 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.
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I 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.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES