To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
TA-NEHISI COATESYou 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.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.
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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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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.
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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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You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
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It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.
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Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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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I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.
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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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’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 COATES