With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
TA-NEHISI COATES[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
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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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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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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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 think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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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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[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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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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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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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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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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Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
TA-NEHISI COATES