[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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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Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
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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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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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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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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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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.
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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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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.
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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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[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.
TA-NEHISI COATES