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.
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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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, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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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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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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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.
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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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It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.
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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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