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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: September 30
Blogger
Comics Writer
Educator
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
TaNehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates
Hatred
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Simplistic
Toward
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Skepticism
Others
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Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words - often ironic and self-deprecating - are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.
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An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
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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. 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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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. You 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.
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My mom used to tell me, I can't use this phrase on the radio - but basically don't be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.
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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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[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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To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.
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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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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
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I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver. 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.
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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, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
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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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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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Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. 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. - Ta
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I think there's a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that's not really it.
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When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth, giving opportunities to other people, it's only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that's a statement.
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates