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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
I don't completely understand why people in Aspen want to hear what I have to say.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
[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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
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 -
I try to write in a way that makes people feel things.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American. You don't just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
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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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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
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 -
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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates -
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 .
Ta-Nehisi Coates