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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 |
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7b7ed11
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I was not always a believer in reparations. I'd read TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson's work on the subject in the late '90s, which convinced me that the negative conditions of black people were tied to the fact of slavery and that recompense for that crime made sense in the broadest way. But like most people who agreed with the idea in principle, I thought it was a wildly impractical solution. Some years later I read Crabgrass Frontier..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ed043b0
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The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bc781a8
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Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic is greeted with a call for treatment and sympathy, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic is greeted with a call for mandatory minimums and scorn. Op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the sympathetic plight of working class whites when their life expectancy approaches levels t..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e7b733f
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Pointing to citizens who voted for both Obama and Trump does not disprove racism; it evinces it. To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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56c68f3
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Not being violent enough could cost me my body; being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1c3703f
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For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm. Enslavement lasted for nearly 250 years. The 150 years that followed have encompassed debt peonage, convict lease-labor, and mass incarceration - a period that overlapped with Jim Crow.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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82f0985
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I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of a greatness that never was, is tragedy.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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952602e
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wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering mys..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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444024c
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The black public intellectual need not be wise, but he had better have answers. There were dissenters in the tradition. There was Derrick Bell, for instance. But mostly I felt the expectation that if I was writing or talking about problems, I should also be able to identify an immediately actionable way out--preferably one that could garner a sixty-vote majority in the Senate. There was a kind of insanity to this--like telling doctors to on..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f2f91dd
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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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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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05cef77
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I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e782a99
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What both visions share is a sense that black culture in its present form is bastardized and pathological. What they also share is a foundation in myth. Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are--and I say this with big pride--the progeny of slaves. If there's any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we've traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but nob..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6be2b98
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In my survey course of America, I'd seen portraits of the Irish drawn in the same ravenous, lustful, and simian way. Perhaps there had been other bodies, mocked, terrorized, and insecure. 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,"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0fe465d
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But satire wasn't within my grasp then; satire is itself a privilege--one that evidences a knowledge of its target.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4e7ebb7
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Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow's quip. "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus," wrote Wiley. "Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3b265a6
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A hostile reading of those words hinges on a misunderstanding of the complexities of segregation. In fact, for the legions of black people who grew up like Michelle Obama--in a functioning, self-contained African American world--racial identity recedes in the consciousness. You know you're black, but in much the same way that white people know they are white. Since everyone else around you looks like you, you just take it as the norm, the s..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8205798
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that is the point of white supremacy--to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (and particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that in working twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump's counter is persuasive--work half as hard as black people and even more is possible.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d7d901b
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that stunted imagination is something I owe to my chains.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6c88509
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The truth of us was always that you were our ring.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c14701e
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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dd9600e
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I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is.
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ta-nehisi-coates-quote
parenthood
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6fc6388
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It was how I'd felt seeing Barack and Michelle during the inauguration, the car slow-dragging down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd cheering, and then the two of them rising up out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9b1d97b
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What if it was true that the masses of white Americans had not been fooled at all but that a critical mass of them had simply identified with a set of "interests" that were not purely economic and so powerful they overawed the class interests that liberals and leftists presumed should be broadly shared?"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |