Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
TA-NEHISI COATESTwo hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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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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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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Racism is, among other things.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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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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More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
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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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