The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhat I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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 did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.
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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.
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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
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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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Racism is, among other things.
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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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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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I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
TA-NEHISI COATES