Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
TA-NEHISI COATESNever forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.
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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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I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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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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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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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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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
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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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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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