More 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 COATESI mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
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I mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.
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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.
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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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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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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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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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Racism is, among other things.
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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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
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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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[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.
TA-NEHISI COATES