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.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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[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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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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[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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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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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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They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.
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What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
TA-NEHISI COATES