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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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specious
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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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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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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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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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 |
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8a1e684
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the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and,
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7b85852
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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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839a46b
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All this time you were growing into words and feelings; my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts of his galaxy, and all the extinction-level events that regarded you with a singular and discriminating interest.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6bd5003
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You would be a man one day, and I could not save you from the unbridgeable distance between you and your future peers and colleagues, who might try to convince you that everything I know, all the things I'm sharing with you here, are an illusion, or a fact of a distant past that need not be discussed. And I could not save you from the police, from their flashlights, their hands, their nightsticks, their guns. Prince Jones, murdered by the m..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5ab25d7
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The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. "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..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1b3f54b
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The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. "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..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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sometimes fail to walk the air
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright--that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me....
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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da15943
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Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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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 killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8e38a18
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Hate gives identity.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aeb9c4d
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not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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One racist act. It's all it takes.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ba889ea
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Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f0cdd3d
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Would rather live white than live free.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ef5fe1a
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The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ad3abd5
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this. To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9fda4f4
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Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4a09c03
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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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ec26192
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so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined--with Eric Garner's anger, with Trayvon Martin's mythical words ("You are gonna die tonight"), with Sean Bell's mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out." --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4fdcf57
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people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic--an orc, troll, or gorgon.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |