I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
TA-NEHISI COATES[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.
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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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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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Racism is, among other things.
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The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.
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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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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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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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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES