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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
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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
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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." --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2242667
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 |
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fef563b
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The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. 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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f496727
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When the homophobe says that same-sex marriage will alter the definition of marriage, he is still a homophobe but he is not a liar. The right of exclusion is part of his definition of an institution that is vital for him and gives his life meaning.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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afe1733
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I did not die in my aimless youth. I did not perish in the agony of not knowing. I was not jailed. I had proven to myself that there was another way beyond the schools and the streets. I felt myself to be among the survivors of some great natural disaster, some plague, some avalanche or earthquake.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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63fe1ba
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Instead, 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 b..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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29cc2df
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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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b82ded0
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I am speaking to you as I always have--as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2210865
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Obama's keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him. To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. That is the tradition to which the "skinny kid with a funny name" who would be president belonged."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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826255e
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But Washington did this in the mid-1980s in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f44f3a8
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Obama's greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition's resolve to destroy him.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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437801e
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But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent--an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, nigger justice reform that could be targeted for destruction, that could be targeted for redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a534aa3
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I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior--they certainly did not curb mine--but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b57e619
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there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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90c22cd
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2308d58
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a17304e
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The girl with the long dreads who slept with whomever she chose, that being her own declaration of control over her body, was there. I grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. There was no room for softness. But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else--that 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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cbba68c
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She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. "And we can't get the message," she said. "We don't understand that we are embracing our deaths."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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50a0673
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The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more--that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never truly know.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0b7d73b
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My experience in this world has been that the 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. . . . There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. . . . "We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2c43cfc
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The changes [in my life] have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0cd894a
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I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. 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 h..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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81d98fe
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But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are a bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a61e2c9
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So there was nothing new in the suddenly transracial spirit that saw the country, in 2008, reaching "for the best part of itself." It had done so before--and then promptly retrenched in the worst part of itself. To see this connection, to see Obama's election as part of a familiar cycle, you would have had to understand how central the brand of white supremacy was to the country. I did not."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c31fd4b
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And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. Even the Dreamers--lost in their great reverie--feel it, for it is Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what they holler in boldness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying. We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers a..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |