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 COATESIn particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
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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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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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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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What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
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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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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES