Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
TA-NEHISI COATESMore 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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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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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 Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully.
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[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.
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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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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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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .
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You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there’s some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and a level of shame.
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