Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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 think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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Racism is, among other things.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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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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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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 scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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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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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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And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.
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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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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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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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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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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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It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.
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