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.
TA-NEHISI COATESYou 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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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.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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I think there’s a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that’s not really it.
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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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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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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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