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39edec7
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You can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position," he said. "The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved. You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable--that can institutionalize the changes you seek--and to engage the other side."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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af9c514
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Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men. He blacks no masters boots, and bows the knee to no one save God alone. He receives higher wages for his labor, than does the laborer of any othe..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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44429f6
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Woodrow Wilson, when he addressed the crowd, did not mention slavery but asserted that the war's meaning could be found in "the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other's eyes."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9290600
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Just play this out as a thought experiment," he said. "Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America--but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America--is getting a really good education. And they're graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates th..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aca55ae
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I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster," he said. "And if you ask them, I'm sure they would say, 'No, actually what you're experiencing is not because you're black, it's because you're a Democrat.' "
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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131401f
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But the underlying presumption--that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other--exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who'd won one competitive political race in her life, whose political instincts were questioned by her own advisers, who took more than half a million dollars in speaking fees from an investment bank because it was "what they offered," who proposed to bring back to the White House a former pr..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6928c32
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The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6416ce8
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Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body--it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor--it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so reg..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9df0ef4
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A legacy of plunder, a network of laws and traditions, a heritage, a Dream, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity. "Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5245980
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rights gradually awarded to the mass of European poor and oppressed, at precisely the same time they were being stripped from enslaved Africans and their descendants.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e6e01e5
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White men," wrote Mississippi senator and eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, "have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill the position here occupied by the servile race."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2282a4e
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We are warriors." "And yet a moment ago, you were women." "Mother, I swear it, I am doing all I can." "And I am sorry, daughter, but you are going to have to do more."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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65a82f8
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African Americans understood they were at war, and reacted accordingly: running away, rebelling violently, fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and--less spectacularly, though more significantly--refusing to work, breaking tools, bending a Christian God to their own interpretation, stealing back the fruits of their labor, and, in covert corners of their world, committing themselves to the illegal act of learning to read.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e0848fb
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Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war, and subsequently turned the antebellum South into a police state.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2c2cc75
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Always lurking among Malcolm's condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion--"You're better than you think you are," he seemed to say to us. "Now act like it."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bcfa579
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In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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babbf76
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The noble white labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, nor bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America's original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price for even incremental gains for the white masses.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e0b3a20
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Son," my father said of Obama, "you know the country got to be messed up for them folks to give him the job."
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politics
presidents
race
race-relations
racism
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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189c935
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The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face t..
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freedom
mythology
race
race-relations
racism
slavery
war
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5307ec8
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Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime--the generational destruction of human bodies--and all of its related offenses--domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances ..
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america
american-history
exploitation
history
race
race-relations
slavery
whiteness
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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372ded7
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but talent is nothing without a field on which to display its gifts.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a25eca4
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He laughed, then continued, "The reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, '[Don't] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don't care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?' "
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7d073e1
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Trump truly is something new--the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his correct name and rightful honorific--America's first white president.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5b27e59
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I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. 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 tale..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3c85015
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The symbolic power of Barack Obama's presidency--that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons from taking up residence in the castle--assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries. And it was that fear that gave the symbols Donald Trump deployed--the symbols of racism--enough potency to make him president, and thus put him in position to injure the world.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fa1bb36
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When it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in some way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. And this is because, at its core, those American myths have never been colorless. They can not be extricated from the theory that a class of people carry peonage in their blood. That peon class provided the foundation on which all those myths and ..
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racism
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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388cb3e
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Americans, too belong to a class--one responsible for and intrinsically tied to a history of torture, bombings, and coups d'etat carried out in our name. And Trump has only heaped more upon the burden. In the global context, perhaps, we Americans are all white.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5994bdc
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Even in those pieces that seemed to be casually tossed off, I was always searching for the right word, for the proper escape from the cliches that threatened every sentence, from truisms that threatened to steer me back into the sentimental dream.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a5fbddf
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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. America had a biography, and in that biography, the shackling of black people - slaves and free - featured prominently...what I sensed was a country trying to skip out on a bill, trying to stave off a terrible accounting.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e42a2cc
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For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d3f49dc
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My reasons for writing had to be my own, divorced from expectation.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a90d5cd
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Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. 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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d156c7b
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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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8193792
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The thing is, a black man can't be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that's still out there," Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama, told the journalist Gwen Ifill after the 2008 election. "However, an extraordinary, gifted, and talented young man who happens to be black can be president."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8018686
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Debating Abraham Lincoln during the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, Stephen Douglas asserted that "this government was made on the white basis" and that the Framers had made "no reference either to the Negro, the savage Indians, the Feejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cada4a5
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Racial attitudes had a significantly greater impact on health care opinions when framed as part of President Obama's plan than they had when the exact same policies were attributed to President Clinton's 1993 health care initiative.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6043aa4
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The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama's presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bfc78b7
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a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances--proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders--and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b71bfaf
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But one reason Obama rose so quickly was that African Americans are war-weary. It was not simply the country at large that was tired of the old baby boomer debates. Blacks, too, were sick of talking about affirmative action and school busing. There was a broad sense that integration had failed us, and a growing disenchantment with our appointed spokespeople. Obama's primary triumphs in predominantly white states gave rise to rumors of a new..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6351267
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And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are relate-but cannot stand in for o..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0a34597
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This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers who felt my work ethic did not match my potential, of black college professors who taught me intellectual rigor. And they did this in a world that every day insulted their humanity. It was not so much that the black layabouts and deadbeats Oba..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f4e2165
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The older poets were Ethelbert Miller, Kenneth Carroll, Brian Gilmore. It is important that I tell you their names, that you know that I have never achieved anything alone.
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poetry
poets
ta-nehisi-coates-quote
theory
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c5ee3a6
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So there was love, and specifically the desire to give to someone who had given so much to me. But too there was a need to liberate myself from old models. I did not want a good woman behind me, beside me, in front of me, or proximate to me in any of the old and maudlin ways.
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marriage
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3e7d936
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That families are better off the stronger and more stable they are is self-evidently important. But so is the notion that no family can ever be made impregnable, that families are social structures existing within larger social structures.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |