If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
TA-NEHISI COATESWith segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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 mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.
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The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
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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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And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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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Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.
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They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.
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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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[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 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 .
TA-NEHISI COATES