With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
TA-NEHISI COATES[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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[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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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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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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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 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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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.
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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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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 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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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES