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 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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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.
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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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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.
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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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Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.
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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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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .
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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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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES