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323953a
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Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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266fa05
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But rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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69df5bc
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Cube's album Death Certificate: "Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation." --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ea8ef90
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Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0342f0b
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It was the program from her ceremony, and on the side was a love note that I could not recognize as such. It was written in that vague, noncommittal way of a girl who wants you to know what she feels but wants to protect herself all the same. I did not know what I was holding, and was caught on the price in self-esteem for figuring it out. I talked to her that night and thanked her, but I did not push like I was supposed to. I could not see..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1b750f7
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Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d09bc8c
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The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e02c3e4
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Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6ce875d
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the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6b30c5b
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the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some ins..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e61c77a
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But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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60e747b
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Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance--no matter how improved--as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3923174
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They were made of small hard things--aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture and thus reflected the spectrum I saw out on the Yard more than all of my alliterative talk of guns or revolutions or paeans to the lost dynasties of African antiquity.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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904b65c
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Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, "intend" for you is secondary."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ac2799a
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study,
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3efb83e
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When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fd7ac17
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In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live--specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c1a681f
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They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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64d4dff
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Americans who think they are white regard us--something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular "problem," nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge. Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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89f1cf4
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And we were all aware that the forces that held back our bodies back at home were not unrelated to those that had given France its wealth. We were aware that much of what they had done was built on the plunder of Haitian bodies, on the plunder of Wolof bodies, on the destruction of the Toucouleur, on the taking of Bissandugu.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b4b2678
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This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways. A little girl wanders home, at age seven, after being teased in school and asks her parents, "Are we niggers and what does this mean?"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2cc1243
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It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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08b2794
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At football games the other students would cheer the star black running back, and then when a black player on the other team got the ball, they'd yell, "Kill that nigger! Kill that nigger!" They would yell this sitting right next to her, as though she really were not there."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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93b03a2
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Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the '60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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733ccab
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I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you to take the assaults heaped upon you now and pay down the debt later.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6b54ec4
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specious
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bb81535
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But even more, the changes have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d409e21
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I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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74e2fc9
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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, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that h..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9df38ec
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But a great number of educators spoke of "personal responsibility" in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4c841e0
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the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language--violence. And I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b204ff9
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nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f7f9182
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My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c62a200
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I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d21cb74
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The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country's second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a spra..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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92743ce
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of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e3c7e62
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6a2f5f4
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Godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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63f10c6
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Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it somehow must be your fault. Trayvon
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7d6bb7d
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It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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79399fe
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Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8f189bb
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today, when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2781cd7
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It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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56e9969
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It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |