The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
TA-NEHISI COATESThat’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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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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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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.
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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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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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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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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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[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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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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An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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