Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
TA-NEHISI COATESAn unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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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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.
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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.
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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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