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 COATESAll you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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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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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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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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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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