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1ec3d9d
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I had believed myself superior to my ancestors. But all it took was the proper amount of pain for me to return to the traditions of old. For even thinking such a thing, I am sorry. I apologize to you as a Wakandian, as a human being, and I apologize to my nation.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cd748d2
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But we were supposed to be exceptional." "Wakanda is exceptional, Baba. And now, more than ever, we need someone to remind us."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c1b8e51
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She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world--which is really the only world she can ever know--ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born i..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b4f6e61
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I am so very proud of you -- your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given -- a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not str..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bc4a14d
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The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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646eb3b
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At this moment the phrase "police reform" has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones a..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ecbd2d5
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When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3d6e69c
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It does not matter that the 'intentions' of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, 'intend' for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense - ignore the heat and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve t..
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justice
reconciliation
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7c847a9
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I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3f85bb6
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It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the method of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the Earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.
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pedestrians
race-in-america
sprawl
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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711d8fc
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And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2a28b6d
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But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. 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 Amer..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6d196cc
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The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8359319
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Some black people will always be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a27690f
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But all the magic I wanted was on the page. And when I looked closely, when I began to study, I did not even see magic, so much as a machinery so elegant, so wondrous, so imaginative as to seem supernatural. I am talking to young writers now. Your heroes are not mystics nor sorcerers but humans practiced at the work of typing and revising, and often agonized by it.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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11639e0
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was freed to truly consider how I wished to live--specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b0a1230
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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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adce34d
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I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world. --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b62d9e2
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And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a4128d6
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What did it mean to, as our elders told us, "grow up and be somebody"? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline?"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c4261f3
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But the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a879d43
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Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away. She
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e65acc0
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Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the '60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0612e96
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Poetry aims for an economy of truth--loose and useless words must 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. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thou..
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writing
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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34ee836
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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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a357d90
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She compared America to Rome. 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." I"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6796bc9
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As much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7a59d80
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And you are here now, and you must live--and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your own home.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e8d2300
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Don't give up your life, preserve your life," he would say. "And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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21af417
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The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b94b12c
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I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9e06815
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I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a1a869e
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I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live--specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a5e9c1e
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When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1cc5f8c
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some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live--
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5f72ddb
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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 moral standard. 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. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e246819
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Our world is physical. Learn to play defense--ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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db6535e
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When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my countr..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f3a3f12
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I think I somehow knew that that third of my brain should have been concerned with more beautiful things. I
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7570a16
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The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones's home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same g..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2b91465
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In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live-- specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God's handiwork, but 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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8772cb3
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My reclamation would be accomplished, like Malcom's, through books, through my own study and exploration. Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday. I had been reading and writing beyond the purview of the schools all my life. Already I was scribbling down bad rap lyrics and bad poetry. The air of that time was charged with the call for a return, to old things, to something essential, some part of us that had been left behind i..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aa7ce6a
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Once we were slaves to haramu-fal. Once we were breed by men solely to give our bodies to other men. We have seen how the woman becomes the enslaved. Let us now show them how the enslaved becomes a legend.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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49d8aa6
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He's screwing with you, T'Challa. I mean, I have ego, but at least my brilliance exceeds my ego." "I'm happy you think so." "I heard that." "Yes, because I said it." "I know. Next time, it'd help you at least tried to say it under your breath."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |