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.
TA-NEHISI COATESI 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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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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[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.
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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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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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Racism is, among other things.
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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
TA-NEHISI COATES