What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
TA-NEHISI COATESThirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.
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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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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
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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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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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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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I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.
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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
TA-NEHISI COATES







