In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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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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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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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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Racism is, among other things.
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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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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 COATES