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.
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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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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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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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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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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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.
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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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What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
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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 would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.
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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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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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[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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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
TA-NEHISI COATES