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1217075
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I have often wondered how I missed the coming tragedy. It is not so much that I should have predicted that Americans would elect Donald Trump. It's just that I shouldn't have put it past us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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988a833
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But then he grabbed the mic like a cudgel, raised it to the sky, lightning struck, and the cudgel was now a hammer, and the slave was transfigured into a god whose voice shivered the Earth. And that is the story hip-hop told me then. And for anyone who has felt, as I so often did, ignorant, enfeebled, enslaved to circumstance, this was myth and this was saga, awesome as any Aeneid, Iliad, or Odyssey.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cb587cc
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Mais une societe qui en protege certains par un filet invisible d'ecoles, d'emprunts immobiliers subventionnes, de richesses accumulees, et ne consent a t'offrir que la protection d'une justice criminelle, cette societe la a echoue dans la mise en pratique de ses bonnes intentions - a moins qu'elle n'ait reussi a imposer quelque chose de bien plus sombre. Quel que soit le nom qu'on donne a ce systeme, il n'a eu qu'un seul resultat: notre in..
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us
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d834c0a
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La rue fait de chaque journee une suite de questions piege, et chaque reponse incorrecte peut provoquer une raclee, une balle dans la peau, une grossesse non desiree. Personne n'en sort indemne. Pourtant, la chaleur qui s degage de ce danger permanent, de ce flirt constant avec la mort, est excitante.
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us
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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73dd490
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J'ai commence a comprendre que le but de mon education etait une forme d'inconfort, un processus qui n'etait pas destine a me recompenser avec mon propre Reve personnel mais qui, au contraire, devait briser tous les reves, tous les mythes reconfortants de l'Afrique, de l'Amerique, de toutes les parties du monde, pour me laisser face a l'humanite dans ce qu'elle a de plus terrible.
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education
racisme
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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346bf9a
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Or l'insecurite ne fait que mettre des bornes a ta perception de la galaxie.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6d9e849
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Toute ma vie, j'avais entendu des gens dire a leurs filles et leurs garcons noirs d'etre "deux fois meilleurs", ce qui revient a dire "accepte d'avoir deux fois moins". Ces paroles etaient prononcees sur un ton de deference religieuse, comme si elles recelaient quelque qualite tacite, quelques imperceptible courage, alors qu'en fait elles ne prouvaient qu'une chose: on avait un fusil pointe sur le front et une main qui nous faisait les poch..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cf8221b
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Regarder cette realite en face est douloureux. Mais notre lexique tout entier - relations interraciales, discriminations, justice raciale, profilage racial, privilege blanc et meme suprematie blanche - ne sert qu'a obliterer l'experience viscerale du racisme, le fait qu'il detruit des cerveaux, empeche de respirer, dechire des muscles, eviscere des organes, fend des os, brise des dents.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1e47bd2
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The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute-the civil rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Dick Gregory summed up the dilemma well. "I committed to nonviolence," Marable quotes him as saying. "But I'm sort of embarrassed by it."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c370da7
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The episode embarrassed the Obama administration, but it also pointed to the great power of white innocence-the need to believe that whatever might befall the country, white America is ultimately blameless.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1659d42
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I understood slavery as bad and I had a vague sense that it had once been integral to the country and that the dispute over it had somehow contributed to the civil war. But even that partial sense ran contrary to the way the civil war was presented in the popular culture, as a violent misunderstanding, an honorable dual between wayward brothers instead of what it was. A spectacular chapter in a long war that was declared when the first Afri..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0147bef
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Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all it's brutality and beauty, not in hopes of changing it, but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie to not be co-opted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f4f7622
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The most powerful country in the world has handed over all of it's affairs, the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of it's water, the viability of it's air, the safety of it's food, the future of it's vast system of education, the soundness of it's national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of nuclear arsenal to a carnival barker who introduce the phrase "grab em b..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ff8817a
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To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d68594d
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And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0bb0354
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Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.
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nonfiction
race-and-racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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51e9307
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Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized history. They had seen so many Malcolmites before and were ready. Their method was rough and direct. Did black skin really convey nobility? Always? Yes. What about the blacks who'd practiced slavery for millennia and sold slaves across the Sahara and then across the sea? Victims of a trick. Would those be the same black kings who birthed all of civilization? Were they then both..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ba10dea
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that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7e5d54b
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I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers--even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8087c98
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I saw, not so much a culture of pathology, as a culture fitted for a pathological world. To fight, stab, or shoot over respect seemed ridiculous to those who already had the society's respect. But all the boys and young men of my youth were keenly aware of how little they owned, how little of their lives they actually controlled. And so some of them made their stand on the scuff mark on their suede Pumas, on the trespassing of some corner, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7d2148e
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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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9067a2a
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All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to "be twice as good," which is to say "accept half as much." These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told thos..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cc1222c
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And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d290542
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But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt's New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow. "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 c..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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efbaa17
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From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They t..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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12ad35c
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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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1d31eff
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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?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f25aa2a
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I went into this investigation imagining history to be a unified narrative, free of debate, which, once uncovered, would simply verify everything I had always suspected. The smokescreen would lift...The trouble came almost immediately. I did not find a coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4026d0a
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love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4426fcf
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You preserved your life because your life, 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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7d85f6f
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But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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25e6f5e
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Indeed, if you're looking for a bridge, if you're looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same way, if you're looking for common ground, then it's true, we should be talking about Obama. But we should make sure we're talking about the right one.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b4cd5f6
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The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant 'government of the people' but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term 'people' to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of 'government of the people,' but the means by which 'the people' acquired their names.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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205c342
|
He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f0a5623
|
All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to "be twice as good," which is to say "accept half as much." These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile." --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2242667
|
Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aadfeea
|
a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below. You and I my son, are that below. There is no them without you, and without the right to brake you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, loose their divinity and tumble out of the dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails towards something other than a human stock yard, how to erect a de..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b75523b
|
Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3dbc9b5
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Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2bfb5bd
|
What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. 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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3d0ba91
|
Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation--those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, "He should have stayed in school," and then wash its hands of him."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8dc310f
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You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ea407c5
|
Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4d22195
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If atheism is important to me, my sense of ancestry is its equal.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |