To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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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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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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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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What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
TA-NEHISI COATES