Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
TA-NEHISI COATESGiving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.
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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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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 sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.
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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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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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.
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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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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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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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Often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
TA-NEHISI COATES