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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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1877944
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sometimes fail to walk the air
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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208ebe6
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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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9256501
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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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f58ce08
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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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cf73664
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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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d537936
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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 |
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4a9d65c
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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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6e4c2e3
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Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d1545bf
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The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1a4ee92
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What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle. I had always known this, had heard the need for a new history in Malcolm, had seen the need addressed in my father's books. It was in the promise behind their grand titles--Children of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Kushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization. Here was not just our history but the history of the world, weaponized to..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cc43c69
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What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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eaa0510
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We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything--cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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14b439a
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Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d482c99
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You can no more be black like I am black than I could be black like your grandfather was.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9e6dc2f
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The crews, the young men who'd transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power. They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies. And their wild reveling, their astonishing acts made their n..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a8fc046
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To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I learned another language consisting of a basic complement of head nods and handshakes. I memorized a list of prohibited blocks.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3877f56
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He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e83f897
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When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done--he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad's voice--"Either I can beat him, or the police." Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn't."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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dd7a292
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When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. 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, and while I couldn't crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the schoo..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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522bd88
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I learned this living among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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daa4194
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I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the schools and their facade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the world of dreamers. I loved him because he made it plain, never mystical or esoteric, because his science was not rooted in the actions of spooks and mystery gods but in the work of the physical world. Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd ever heard.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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85076de
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I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side. "The meek shall inherit the earth" meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ef088f9
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When she got out of the car, my world had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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84346a3
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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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c54ad9f
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The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so precious.
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inspirational
inspirational-quotes
life
life-lessons
living
people-of-color
security
soul
soul-searching
spirit
survival
surviving-life
thoughtful
thoughts
wisdom
wise-words
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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322a642
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And I knew that there were children born into these same caged neighborhoods on the Westside, these ghettos, each of which was planned as any subdivision. They are an elegant act of racism, killing fields authored by federal policies, where we are, all again, plundered of our dignity, of our families, of our wealth, and of our lives. [. . .] "Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the co..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2c28caa
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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 |