The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
TA-NEHISI COATESTo prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.
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Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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