Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
TA-NEHISI COATESNever forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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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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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 President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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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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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An 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.
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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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And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.
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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
TA-NEHISI COATES