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If, to the end of its existence, America harbors white supremacy, I don't know how remarkable that would be. France has dealt with anti-Semitism since its inception.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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I am always surprised people are surprised that people haven't read things.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
There is some group of Americans who are really, really curious to understand how we ended up at this point, where every week it seems like you can turn on your TV and see some sort of abuse being heaped on black people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
Breitbart media is named after the same gentleman who basically framed Shirley Sherrod during the Obama administration.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
I think it's really important to be conscious of yourself and the world around you. For me, that meant reading a lot and reporting.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
I'm not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton's neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it's there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
I have never read 'To Kill A Mockingbird.'
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Like a lot of people, I'm very, very concerned about Senator Clinton's record. I'm very, very concerned about where her positions were in the 1990s, when we had some of the most disgusting legislation in terms of our criminal justice, really, in this country's history.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
People review my comic books. People review every article I write - 'The Atlantic' even publishes them. A great deal of the critique of 'Between the World and Me' was from a feminist perspective. bell hooks pushed back, among others. Some of that has value. Some of it does not. I try my best to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
Abraham Lincoln was killed by the forces of white supremacy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
I guess I'd be put in the ID politics camp. But there is really nothing in the world-view of, say, Bernie Sanders I actually disagree with. I'd like a guaranteed income, single-payer health care, a stronger safety net, etc. The problem is the temptation to paper over historically fraught issues to achieve that is tempting.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
We had particular policies in this country that resulted in the larger share of poverty that we have in African-American communities.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
In the mid-90s The older gods were falling off. EPMD were breaking. Chuck and Flav had taken us as far as they could, and already the new voices were being hijacked by the death cults. Brothers who last week were shouting out Malcolm were flipped into studio gangsters, killing every nigger in sight.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.
Ta-Nehisi Coates