The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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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[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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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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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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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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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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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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Talk about class and hope no one notices.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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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