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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 |
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8efed5f
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You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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84b0af3
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We are not blind to recent events, Tetu. Nor are we blind to Damisa-Sakri's allies. But we are, as you say, a new country, a new nation. Prudence is required." "Even in your allies." " Especially our allies."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4554a3a
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We know who you are. We know of your battles with the king. We think you may well prove to be a true friend of our cause. But right now all we share are kind words and a common enemy. That is not yet enough.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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227b27b
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I do not think your problem is an old philosopher. I do not think your problem is the renegade Dora Milaje. Your problem, T'Challa... is the people.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5b27ddd
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For my people I have battled world-breakers, death cultists, and men who would make themselves gods. For my people, I lost the only woman I ever truly loved. There is nothing left, Mother. I have given it all." "No, T'Challa. Let us not mince words here-- you have never given willingly. You feel the weight of the crown, but you have never felt the great honor of being king. Your people are a burden to you, and you have never let them forget..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7227e0f
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I am Damisa-sakri. And there is no escape. Not for my enemies. Not for my people. Not for my mother. Not for me. So much rage. So much hate. I must master all of it. I must not let it master me.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cfa0424
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These men are Wakandan, even in rebellion. Pride in their nation was everything to them. And when the Golden City fell, they fell with it. Now they fashion their very bodies into living bombs, for they measure their lives in the blood of others. I know what haunts them-- shame, hate, rage. I know what shall save them. The Golden City fell. But Wakanda has not yet died.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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07f0fb5
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Poetry aims for an economy of truth--loose and useless words must be discarded,
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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27a39e0
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I come back to the motherland and this is the thanks I get?" "Still better than the knife-wielding thugs I found in Harlem, Misty. You do remember, don't you?" "I resent the term "thug"." "That's 'cause you a thug." "For life."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9b6df17
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You... kill... what you cannot control. Break... what you cannot bend. Is this what all my teachings have brought you to? Victory by any means? Conquest? Terror? You say you oppose kings, and yet your methods do not differ from theirs. You say you war against tyranny, but you too war against your own people. You say you bring the power of life. Then how did it happen that your very name became death?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aca8533
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The question with no answer. This is what you wished us to consider. But there was an answer. And you knew it. "What is our remedy against the robber, who so broke into our house?" We burn down the house-- with the robber inside."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9b3fe72
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Enslaved" is what the plunderer does to a righteous woman but "a slave" is a righteous woman who has accepted the plunderer's law."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e1041e9
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The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism a la carte. A nation outlives it generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delawre, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying ou..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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336cd71
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Black is beautiful
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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86d7fef
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You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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862540c
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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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4322fc6
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All of these heroes had failed to cajole and coerce the masters of America. Their ambition of a better world had been frustrated. This was the story of my ancestors, the story I expected for myself. These were not stories of hope, but were they without import? If Celia, Margaret, and Ida had failed to help the country at large locate its morality, they had succeeded in living by their own. And that was all they could control. Within the sma..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c0c6582
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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 r..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3129067
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I am speaking to you as I always have - as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good a..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f44a11b
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I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness. I resolved to hide nothing from you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3e535c9
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I sought a world where peasants and kings were as brothers. But what new world was ever made without the sword? Now I am old, and I fear that some young dreamer shall resolve my contradiction, and commit to that which is both terrible and plain. On that day the era of theory will have passed. All the dreamers will be dead.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b114c51
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I will be king. Your country needs me. I'm gonna bring out the best in Wakanda. And what is best in Wakanda is that fantastic pile of vibranium. I'm gonna make 'em love me, baby.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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171065b
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Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |