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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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: September 30
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TaNehisi Coates
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More quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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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What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through--that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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
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I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House. 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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that's a statement.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
Ta-Nehisi Coates