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.
TA-NEHISI COATESI 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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I mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.
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All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.
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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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I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.
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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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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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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 unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.
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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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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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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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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.
TA-NEHISI COATES






