Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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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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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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.
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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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What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.
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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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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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
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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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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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More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
TA-NEHISI COATES