Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
TA-NEHISI COATESIs the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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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[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.
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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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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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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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