It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.
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Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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 essence of American racism is disrespect.
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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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