What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
TA-NEHISI COATESWhat I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
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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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
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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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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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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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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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That’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.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.
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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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To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
TA-NEHISI COATES