I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
TA-NEHISI COATESAnd they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
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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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[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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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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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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[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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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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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
TA-NEHISI COATES