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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 |
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c9669a2
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the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
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race-in-america
white-privilegel
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8339ed2
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Black is beautiful--which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5baf93f
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it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and for..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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351695c
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And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before--that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else's dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains--my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bd5fe8e
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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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4a0807d
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An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0f388fa
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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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d23bb21
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what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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89c994d
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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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327ba79
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Educated children never offered excuses--certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a86123d
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I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ebbe13d
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We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a6a1d89
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As I learned the house, and began to read, and began to see more of the Quality, I saw that just as the fields and its workers were the engine of everything, the house itself would have been lost without those who tasked within it. My father, like all the masters, built an entire apparatus to disguise this weakness, to hide how prostrate they truly were. The tunnel, where I first entered the house, was the only entrance that the Tasked were..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a4bebcd
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She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f96527c
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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 an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as 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 the stories they tell?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2bc764f
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The low whites, men such as our own Harlan, were tolerated publicly by the Quality, but spurned in private; their names were spat out at banquets, their children mocked in the parlors, their wives and daughters seduced and discarded. They were a degraded and downtrodden nation enduring the boot of the Quality, solely for the right to put a boot of their own to the Tasked.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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166df4c
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Breathing. I just dream of breathing
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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905423b
|
The spirit and soul are the body and the brain, which are destructible--that is precisely why they are so precious.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c42344c
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This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental "firsts" - first black five star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e0d5130
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Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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68d5cbe
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How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me - the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal of this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |