I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.
TA-NEHISI COATESI’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.
TA-NEHISI COATESTo prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
TA-NEHISI COATESThirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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.
TA-NEHISI COATESThis 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.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhat 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 COATESAnd they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
TA-NEHISI COATESMore specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
TA-NEHISI COATESTwo hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
TA-NEHISI COATESGiving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
TA-NEHISI COATESYou don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
TA-NEHISI COATESI 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 .
TA-NEHISI COATESThat’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.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhat I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
TA-NEHISI COATESLot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
TA-NEHISI COATESRacism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
TA-NEHISI COATES