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d8372ef
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These were the injuries, among any others, that Sologon- the so-called Buffalo Woman- was made to carry. But every dart endured, every torture tolerated, tempered her. Sologon grew strong. Ruthless. Hard.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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adba2c6
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I wonder if this is it. If I have finally flown too far from home. I think of Ramonda and Ororo. Zuri and W'Kabi. Father and S'yan. But above all, I think of you. and I think of dying out here, of drifting out here, in search of but far away from you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2734f2c
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And I remember that I have come to bring you back, in the full ambition that it is you who will bring all of us back. What have you discovered here, Shuri?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8c22fed
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Even in their final hours, my parents had hope. Once, they had put their hope in Wakanda. Now, they put their hope in Killmonger who would make Niganda great. Greater than even Wakanda. He promised them power and a country greater than any country in Africa. They were blinded by their desperate faith. Blinded by their hope.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4410a39
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We live in a goal-oriented era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms...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 handwork, but the black b..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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725965a
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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 ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos--the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and cr..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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caa6b20
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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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5e7e1d1
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I was only beginning to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger--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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b3b9d63
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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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60275f1
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I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. 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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44ed481
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So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5e5fe3c
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There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound. --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f1efcf3
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The truth of us was always that you were our ring. 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. Everything else was subordinate to this fact. If that sounds like a weight, it shouldn't. The truth is that I owe you everything I have. Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all becau..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d1a6b15
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If he could se me here, S'yan would remind me that the handlers of these men are dictators, despots, and strongmen. That their peace is the peace of the dead. I am a king. And while they derive their power from gun barrels, I derive mine from a god. Some days I wake up actually believing this. And every day I wake up knowing my people must believe this.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2411c01
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Either you are a nation, or you are nothing.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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88f59c7
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She had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater number of everyone I'd known. I felt then that these men - these 'fathers' - were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in our ranks. 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 wom..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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388c6f7
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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...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 names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language an..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c8043e9
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Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, honestly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would knuckle up,c all on cousins and crews, and, if it came to it, pull guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out of their parents' homes and discovered t..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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577d752
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I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language - violence.
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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 |
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aeeb5dc
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Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.' This is what they had told me all my life. It was the language of survival, a myth that helped us cope with the human sacrifice that finds us no matter our manhood. As though our hands were ever our own.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b991ec6
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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 her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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76b8d70
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Some days I would take the train into Manhattan. There was so much money everywhere, money flowing out of bistros and cafes, money pushing the people at incredible speeds, up the wide avenues, money drawing intergalactic traffic through Times Square, money in the limestones and brownstones, money out on West Broadway where white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police. I would see these people at the club, d..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b0fa8d5
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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. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stove wood, through hot iron peel..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7d0d286
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I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of 'race' - 'race' itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard - usually believing himself white - proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all be..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b2c756c
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Your route will be different. It must be. You knew things at eleven that I did not know when I was twenty-five. When I was eleven my highest priority was the simple security of my body. My life was the immediate negotiation of violence - within my house and without. But already you have expectations, I see that in you. Survival and safety are not enough. Your hopes - your dreams, if you will - leave me with an array of warring emotions. I a..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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872f2ca
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As she talked of the church, I thought of your grandfather, the one you know, and how his first intellectual adventures were found in the recitation of Bible passages. I thought of your mother, who did the same. And I thought of my own distance from an institution that has, so often, been the only support for our people. I often wonder if in that distance I've missed something, some notions of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physica..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9e24f11
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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
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e8ef27f
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I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5d07bb8
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It is a lie- one that makes your life of philosophy possible. We studied a lot together. And yet in all our time we never studied a single nation founded on truth and candor. My teachers were imaginative and visionary. But they dug no wells, built no walls, fed no children. The best of them were only men of theory." "But we were Wakanda. We were the Golden City. We were supposed to be exceptional." "We still are are Wakanda. And we will alw..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ce90dea
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I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear fo..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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046e9a1
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I was not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so much of what I'd felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the immortal wish, and the timeless will, I saw in Hayden's work. And that was what I heard in Malcolm, but never like this - quiet, pure, and unadorned. I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago - the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetr..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e03b6b4
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What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. Perhaps
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4a709ae
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And she could not lean on her country for help. When it came to her son, Dr. Jones's country did what it does best-- it forgot him. 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 ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c801f82
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Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" I judged them against the country I knew, which had a..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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97ebc5b
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A society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6f62c2c
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The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fd7d597
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You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f2ee62a
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Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive passivity, or conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never ou..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7f48174
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I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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66d3a62
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The next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musee Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was busting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was t..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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83c6b01
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This is the foundation of the Dream--its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |