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5a8846d
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Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of racism begins with Tawana Brawley and ends with the Duke lacrosse team.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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963aa36
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The irony of Barack Obama is this: He has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being "clean" (as Joe Biden once labeled him)--and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts--one, a..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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64781b7
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That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children--fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4430946
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you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. 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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bf9a315
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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. That
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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52961f9
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There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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18b3252
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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, our conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never o..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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68b2639
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It did not occur to me that writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one's roots or expertise or even one's own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8ace5be
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race" itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d0782c7
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The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the Civil War, represented an inconceivable financial interest--$75 billion in today's dollars--and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60 percent of the country's exports. In 1860, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River Valley, where the estates of large planters loomed.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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015138f
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For that more ennobling narrative, as for much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.
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white-supremacy
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b6b0030
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I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew there was nothing noble in it.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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88ce210
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There were honeys from across the city - Westport, Hollander Ridge, Gwynn Oak, Northwood. They were everything from redbone to yo-yo darkskin. The dimes among them carried Benetton bags, were dolled up like Lily Powers - finger waves, a head of dyed blond, and eyes like enchanted daggers. I saw we were outnumbered, as brothers who try the civilized way always are.
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men-versus-women
men-vs-women
outnumbered
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d69663c
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This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands. To
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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862f0c0
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The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own. I
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a4df3ab
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Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra - 'Either I can beat him or the police.' I understood it all - the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you kill..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e208e23
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You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6646297
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Americans who think they are white regard us--something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular "problem," nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge. Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8c4e992
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That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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07c5562
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My wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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58d5245
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There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separate..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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500ab57
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ours. By then I'd read Chancellor Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson--writers central to the canon of our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egypt was black, and Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti was black--and "the black race" was a thing I supposed existed from time immemorial, a thing that was real and mattered."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7cd8939
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The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2efa67e
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No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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277633c
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The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |