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.
TA-NEHISI COATESI want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
TA-NEHISI COATES