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015138f
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For that more ennobling narrative, as for much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.
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white-supremacy
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b6b0030
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I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew there was nothing noble in it.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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88ce210
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There were honeys from across the city - Westport, Hollander Ridge, Gwynn Oak, Northwood. They were everything from redbone to yo-yo darkskin. The dimes among them carried Benetton bags, were dolled up like Lily Powers - finger waves, a head of dyed blond, and eyes like enchanted daggers. I saw we were outnumbered, as brothers who try the civilized way always are.
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men-versus-women
men-vs-women
outnumbered
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d69663c
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This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands. To
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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862f0c0
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The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own. I
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a4df3ab
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Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra - 'Either I can beat him or the police.' I understood it all - the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. 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 kill..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e208e23
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You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6646297
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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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8c4e992
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That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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07c5562
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My wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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58d5245
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There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separate..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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500ab57
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ours. By then I'd read Chancellor Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson--writers central to the canon of our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egypt was black, and Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti was black--and "the black race" was a thing I supposed existed from time immemorial, a thing that was real and mattered."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7cd8939
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The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2efa67e
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No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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277633c
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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6975a4a
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I was made for the library, not the classroom.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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006e26d
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When I came to Howard, Chancellor Williams's Destruction of Black Civilization was my Bible.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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136c1c7
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There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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78ed75d
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Keep your end of the yard clean and leave the justice to the Lord.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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26c71a3
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The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly,
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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401cf49
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Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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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 |