What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhat I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
TA-NEHISI COATESBetter you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
TA-NEHISI COATESThirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
TA-NEHISI COATES[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 COATESTo prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhen you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.
TA-NEHISI COATESTwo hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
TA-NEHISI COATESI think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
TA-NEHISI COATESNever forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
TA-NEHISI COATESReparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
TA-NEHISI COATESI would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
TA-NEHISI COATESThe best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
TA-NEHISI COATESAn 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 COATESIt 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.
TA-NEHISI COATESI think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
TA-NEHISI COATES