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bd1dc94
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Should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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10ff2d0
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We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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14d1743
|
The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.
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prejudice
racism
slavery
hr-40
white-guilt
institutionalized-racism
reparations
whiteness
slavery-in-the-united-states
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cf4c6f3
|
We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could--and must--fashion the way of our walk.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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eb34f51
|
Every February, my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their child..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8b1d59c
|
traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b1d16d7
|
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0273b98
|
Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.
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institutionalized-racism
reparations
chicago
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6d7188f
|
The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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00b9278
|
I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their name..
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fear
systemic-racism
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4cf300f
|
My parents were two-faced. To me, they showed no mercy. They preached from theBook of Fallen Children - Commandment 1: The Child Is Always Ungrateful. At eighteen, the free ride would stop, and I'd be dumped into the mess of the world. But in their private moments, they were soft, cowed by love. They critiqued their own parenting skills and thought of all the ways the could help their kids get ahead.
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two-faced
parenting-children
parents
parents-and-children
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3b341ac
|
I thank my mother (Ma, you're only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it.
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mothers-and-sons
mothers
parenting
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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59bc928
|
Dylan's voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B that Dad took as gospel. But the lyrics wore him down, until he played Dylan in that addicted manner of college kids who cordon off portions of their lives to decipher the prophecies of their favorite band. Dad heard poetry, but more than that an angle that confirmed what a latent part of him already suspected. This was was bullshit.
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vietnam-war
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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11e1a5f
|
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly,
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e1ea79e
|
The idea of race as an indelible attribute "is a new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white." These people are a "modern invention" whose whiteness "has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white--Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish--and if all our national hopes h..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7c615aa
|
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. This"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cb9f7b7
|
I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead in hopes that the predators would move to an actual fight.
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predators
puberty
fights
pacifism
prey
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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80bd18c
|
I was raised on the struggle of elders - iron collars, severed feet, the rifle of dirty Harriet, and down through the years, the Muslims and regal Malcolm. But mostly what I saw around me was rank dishonor: cable and Atari plugged into every room, juvenile parenting, niggers sporting kicks with price tags that looked like mortgage bills. The Conscious among us knew the whole race was going down, that we'd freed ourselves from slavery and Ji..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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08adfdc
|
And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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50d2dcd
|
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
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ca7d8a4
|
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. This
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3bd4c65
|
What any institution, or its agents, "intend" for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense--ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0e18acd
|
I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same unifor..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f46c8b2
|
Why - for us and only us - is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d44a859
|
My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c8e8073
|
There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d0361e1
|
I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful -- the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find hi..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a0c4cb2
|
There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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637e4f1
|
What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2ba6a8c
|
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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1bbafd6
|
But more than any shame I feel about my own actual violence, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you. "I could have you arrested," he said. Which is to say, "One of your son's earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bffe081
|
We know how we will die--with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f968905
|
Thandiwe, when they come for you, do not scream. Do not plead. Do not cry, for your cries are but song to them.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f131326
|
You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you." "But this is the Wakanda we have. And while the Midnight Angels breathe, I swear to you... they shall all pay."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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af217a0
|
The day after I became king, S'yan offered a single piece of wisdom. 'Power lies not in what a king does, but in what his subjects believe he might do.' This was profound. For it meant that the majesty of kings lay in their mystique... not in their might.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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94fff36
|
I wish he'd told me not just of the power of kings, but of the might of the people. I wish he'd warned me that they, too, have secrets. They, too, have mysteries. They, too, possess a power of their own.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cb0f850
|
I was wrong. My enemy is not a beguiler, but a revealer. She brings out of us all the awful feelings that we have hidden away. And makes them manifest. So I know now that this is who I am. Might. Shame. Rage. And now they know, too.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9fd56af
|
Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.
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|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
2ecb783
|
The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible- that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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086dbae
|
In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all.
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music
hip-hop
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
58db627
|
Sometimes it is subtle--the simple observation of who lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it's all of it at once. I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0472f54
|
Ororo, I asked you to come because you are my best friend, and because..." "Because some things, my king, are easier to annual than others." --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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51bc840
|
Her country crumbling to dust, and with broken men all around, Queen Shuri went off to her doom. I could have gone with her. But someone had to fight and someone had to live. And after we parted, I wondered- still wonder- how a man walks away and leaves his only sister to die.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b7e719c
|
I know the danger. I know we may not come back, and in so doing, doom a nation. I would give my life for my nation. But I will not give the life of my sister. I will not, yet again, be parted from my own blood.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |