Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
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My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK.
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When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.
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There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.
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I was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree.
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The Ku Klux Klan is the most profligate domestic terrorist organization in this country's history.
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Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe.
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I try to write in a way that makes people feel things.
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My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.'
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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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With George Bush's policies, I could make an argument for how they affect black people in a negative way. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't argue that he's a white supremacist.
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You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery.
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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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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.
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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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When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.
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It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true - his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.
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The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully. Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.
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Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system. It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited. 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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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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Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.
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I've been very, very careful to tell people what I am qualified to talk about and what I'm not qualified to talk about.
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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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These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
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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.