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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
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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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9648847
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And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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38c49b4
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9387dc9
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writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one's roots or expertise or even one's own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a325c75
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From hip-hop, I drew my earliest sense of what writing should mean. Grammar was never the point. Grammar was for the schoolmen and their television dreams. Out here, in the concrete and real, sentences should be supernatural, words strung together until they compelled any listener to repeat them at odd hours, long after the bass line had died. And these sentences or bars, linked together into verses, should have a shading and mood that refl..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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148989d
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the jails springing up around me, that argued for ghettos and projects, that viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to the preservation of order.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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209a03e
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But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity--not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience--then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a8792ac
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The crude communal myth about black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to black women--either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative relationship between success and black culture. Before we actually had one, we could not imagine a black president who loved being black. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his first kiss with the woman who would become his wife as tasting "..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8cffe0e
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The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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488e108
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I think where I got frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath. Very rarely did I lose it publicly. Usually I'd just smile.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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09e0204
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Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation: These bonded white people into a broad aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c722a30
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But he said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. "To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn't mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line," he said. "It goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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95603fc
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And now the lies of the Civil War and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8993aab
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race" itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem." --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0478cf2
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I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was--a gate to some other blue world.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a1b2958
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For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America's first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also a declaration of war.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e191741
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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. I could remember, as a child, the nationalists cla..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7281ab8
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Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b955869
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Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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56f1766
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The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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63f2388
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1914, its first war on drugs,*13 passing the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine. The reasoning was unoriginal. "The use of cocaine by unfortunate women generally and by negroes in certain parts of the country is simply appalling," the American Pharmaceutical Association's Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit had concluded in 1902. The New York Times published an article by a physician sayi..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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10aad80
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Elijah Forrester, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, opposed the Eisenhower administration's 1956 civil rights bill on the grounds that "where segregation has been abolished," black villainy soon prospered.*16 "In the District of Columbia, the public parks have become of no utility whatever to the white race," Forrester claimed, "for they enter at the risk of assaults upon their person or the robbery of their personal effects." Unless s..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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727aeef
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This story began, as all writing must, in failure.
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opening-lines
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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262b830
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In the cities of the North, "European immigrants' struggle" for the credential of whiteness gave them the motive to oppress blacks, writes Christopher Muller, a sociologist at Columbia who studies incarceration: "A central way European immigrants advanced politically in the years preceding the first Great Migration was by securing patronage positions in municipal services such as law enforcement."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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552a138
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Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show ask me what it meant to loose my body.
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opening-lines
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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24430c0
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America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional mor..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e61bef0
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By Obama's lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only "the United States of America." All these disparate strands of the American experience were bound together by a common hope: It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravel..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |