[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.
TA-NEHISI COATESRacism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
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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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It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.
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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
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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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This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.
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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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What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.
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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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When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.
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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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