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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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parenthood
ta-nehisi-coates-quote
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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 |
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4cfd2d7
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You will have to man up," we tell our sons. "Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father." This is what they had told me all my life."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f36ed63
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But any investigation into the actual details revealed that the ladders themselves were not equal--that to be a member of the "black race" in America had specific, quantifiable consequences. Not only did poor blacks tend to be much less likely to advance up their ladder, but those who did stood a much greater likelihood of tumbling back. That was because the middle-class rung of the black ladder lacked the financial stability enjoyed by the..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fea4508
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Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e657fce
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To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism a la carte.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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10df23d
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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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7bd7392
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This idea was the deep subtext of our lives. It had to be. The visible text was survivalist.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a461ec3
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It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d048a05
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The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands. To acknowledge the horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning towards something mur..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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78dc727
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The promise of a cost-free escape from history should have made me suspicious. But what ultimately made me question the "rising tide" idea was not the theory itself but all the attendant theories that so often went with it."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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35da8cd
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The Jim Crow South," writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political science professor at Columbia, "was the one collaborator America's democracy could not do without." The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmw..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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19b8808
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As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards' code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood... any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters--and "a colored man of means who was giving his children a col..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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da49d04
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That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1534ba0
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I 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 were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions -- beautiful writing rarely is. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had..
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writing
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ab7d5f0
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I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliation and transmute pain into rage. So I took the agony of that era like a collection notice and hid it away in the upper dresser of the mind, resolved to return to it when I had means to pay. I think now, today, I have settled almost all of those old accounts. But the ache and aftershock of failure remain long after the drawer is bare.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2fffaf7
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I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language--as though he actually trusted them and believed in them. It was not my language.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c4ab659
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We forgot that there were those who loved that old country as it was, who did not lament the divisions, but drew power from them. And so, we saw postcards with watermelons on the white house lawn. We saw simian caricatures of the first family, the invocation of a food stamp president, and his anti-colonialist Islamist agenda. These were the fetishes that gathered the tribe of white supremacy, that rallied them to the age-old banner. And if ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8aa1743
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Still later, I read Ira Katznelson's history of discrimination, When Affirmative Action Was White, which argued that similar exclusions applied to other "color-blind" New Deal programs, such as the beloved GI Bill, social security, and unemployment insurance. I was slowly apprehending that a rising tide, too, could be made to discriminate. A raft of well-researched books and articles pointed me this way. From historians, I learned that the ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e96c065
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We were laughing but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge... The law did not protect us and now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans..
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race-relations
racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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926f75d
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Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany's reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8091f81
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The weakness in the case for integration was that it ultimately rested on a critical mass of white people playing along, either out of their own particular interests or some sense of morality. History has produced few instances for the former and virtually none of the latter. This made sense. If there is a power that has ever surrendered itself purely out of some altruistic sense of justice, I have yet to come across it.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6992b66
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White supremacy is a crime and a lie, but it's also a machine that generates meaning. This existential gift, as much as anything, is the source of its enormous, centuries-spanning power.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |