The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
TA-NEHISI COATESAn 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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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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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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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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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
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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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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 scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
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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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