I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
TA-NEHISI COATESWith segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
-
-
The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
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.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
TA-NEHISI COATES -
Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.
TA-NEHISI COATES -
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 -
Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
TA-NEHISI COATES