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46397c5
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And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a237d18
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But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. 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?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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74d9683
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Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing lights through the windows. They took my identification and returned to the squad car. I sat there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my teachers what I'd learned about PG County through reporting and reading the papers. And so I kne..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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40855b1
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What I came to understand was the great democracy in this, and that what mattered to these boys was not so much what you came to the street with but how you carried what you were given.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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476ff43
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And it occurred to me then that you would not escape, that there were awful men who'd laid plans for you, and I could not stop them. Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears.And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and mus..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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973bdb3
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And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c8fa26c
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And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0f5943c
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The new people were something else before they were white--Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish--and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1945cf1
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I had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b9b4ff9
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The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d23d226
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After these readings, I followed as the poets would stand out on U Street or repair to a cafe and argue about everything--books, politics, boxing. And their arguments reinforced the discordant tradition I'd found in Moorland, and I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power. I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Springarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the in..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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27c46de
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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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defddd0
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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
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2745c4c
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Perhaps being named "black" had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fb3059b
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I do not long for those days. I have no desire to make you "tough" or "street," perhaps because any "toughness" I garnered came reluctantly. I think I was always, somehow, aware of the price. I think I somehow knew that a third of my brain should have been concerned with more beautiful things. I think I felt that something out there, some force, nameless and vast, had robbed me of...what? Time? Experience? I think you know something of what..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a9c97e8
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Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing -- myself. Here was the lesson: I was not innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5195762
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But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. 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..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8daf68f
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But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. "They have been taught to labor," the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. "They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0c0a897
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And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now--my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually..
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curiosity
frustration
perseverance
resilience
struggle
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9520059
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Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7052752
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I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned in curiosity. They were concerned in compliance... 60% of all black men who drop out of school end up in jail. This should disgrace our country, but it does not.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d6d0b5a
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That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8c28985
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I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I'd once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps they had known something terrible about the world. Perhaps they so wilingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place. And all those old photography's from the 1960s, all those films I beheld of black people..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d6959a7
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race is the child of racism, not the father.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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80ea453
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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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f6a9e31
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Perhaps the Irish too had once lost their bodies. Perhaps being named "black" had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f2838f9
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I read about Queen Nzinga who ruled in Central Africa in the 16th century resisting the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the Dutch. When the Dutch Ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I saw. and the story of our own royalty became for me a weapon.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2c94eaf
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I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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da8b658
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your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4a9d4c4
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Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," declared Mississippi as it left the Union, "the greatest material interest of the world."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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538c2eb
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Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed. And still the questions behind the questions are never asked. 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 all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing weddin..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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92194b4
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I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cde0b95
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I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. 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 s..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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55f2220
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I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, 'We don't know these folks! Be cool!' I did not do this. I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew that there was nothing noble in it. But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing--that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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df0b070
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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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d2ae4de
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Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don't look.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e3c230f
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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 the time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8561ceb
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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 Dreamers, at least 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, like all empires of humans, are built ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1fe5278
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and 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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8f9a1c2
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The focus on one sector of Trump voters--the white working class--is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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198e769
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The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States--and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as long. Like the black working class, the white working class originates in bondage--the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In their early seventeenth-century primordial state..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cdddf23
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culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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096b0eb
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For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people--acted out by white people, on white people's terms--in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupt..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d557b32
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propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |