Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
TA-NEHISI COATESThese were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
More Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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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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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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With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.
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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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What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
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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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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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[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.
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Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?
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Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.
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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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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.
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And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.
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In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.
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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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Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
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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 .
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Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.
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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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You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there’s some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and a level of shame.
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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.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.
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The essence of American racism is disrespect.
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