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0ab7cf9
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You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy,..
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racism
america
united-states-of-america
blacks
whites
police-reform
usa
united-states
race-relations
police
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2077a40
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The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dre..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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698fd55
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And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b801b36
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I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago--the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth--loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1154bb6
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Every Trump voter is certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it was acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e668f37
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Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you, and said, "You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1f74416
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My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers--even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being "politically conscious"--as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as..
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meaning
life
certainty
questioning
questions
searching
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f426983
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And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the s..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f8f2520
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To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5ad4666
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I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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44a85e2
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The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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97d847e
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America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0c9486f
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The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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548f705
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Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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722e77c
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Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body--it is heritage.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a44d589
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Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not,
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b56e020
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I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4579ebf
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At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies--cotton--was America's primary export.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f0fe35b
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Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and t..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7bcda1f
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My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c30c05b
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White America" is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f049817
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It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have time to share, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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88783e8
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It does not matter that the "intentions" of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, "intend" for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense--ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve th..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1aa8317
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Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f792f96
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I did not ask. Later I felt bad about this. I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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17db12c
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Black is beautiful--which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4f47594
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And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fb18620
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She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. "There he was," she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. "He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is true of me. I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It's all it takes."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3774e29
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An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. 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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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7669c78
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The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black," said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. "And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals." And there it is--the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1a9abeb
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Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protecti..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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de835a8
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Soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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36f7b43
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But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f8ddbea
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If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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242cc2d
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I didn't always have things, but I had people--I always had people.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d06ea13
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I don't ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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df0deec
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And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2bf4203
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All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be "twice as good," which is to say "accept half as much." These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told thos..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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70c84e6
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I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
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coping
racism
resilience
racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4ab18b9
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We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any," writes Solzhenitsyn. "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law." This is the foundation of the Dream -- its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor,..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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00130ca
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I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you -- but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real -- when the police decide that tactics for the ghetto should enj..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e88a735
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In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. From that perspective, it seemed possible that the success of one man really could alter history, or even end it.
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white-supremacy
obama
racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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860e470
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There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the Sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that very racism, pinned into ghettoes, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born. And so we struggle out of fear for our children. We struggle out of fear for ourselves. We struggle to avoid our feelings, ..
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struggle-against-racism
systematic-racism
american-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f093be5
|
Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |