Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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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My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.
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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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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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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 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.
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The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.
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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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