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08050fc
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By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew--and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control i..
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struggle
racism
life
blacks
whites
race-relations
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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02738a5
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One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness--the black gangster, the black rioter--that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract--The Cosby Show, for instance. B..
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racism
american-myths
birtherism
black-respectability
good-negro-government
race-relations
race
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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81a869a
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I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tale..
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fairy-tales
cultural-myths
maga
make-america-great-again
pound-cake-speech
revisionist-history
myths
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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79757d5
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the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coa..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8f676b8
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I don't ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don't ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails. I don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0120665
|
Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.
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poverty
opportunity
juvenile-delinquency
juvenile-justice-system
single-parenting
criminals
direction
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b039cb7
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I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It's all it takes.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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21f8067
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f52492c
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To Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ac596c9
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think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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da2270f
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Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it must somehow be your fault. Trayvon Martin's hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis's loud music did the same.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ae5fbf4
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Art was not an after-school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all its brutality and beauty, not in hopes of changing it but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie, to not be coopted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b449755
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Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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92b0951
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This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello--which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors.
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black-power
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2becaaf
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I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.
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violence
schools
weaponry
state
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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940d675
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The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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dde590f
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I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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247ae97
|
If you're black, you were born in jail," Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home from school, in my lack of control over my body."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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04223cf
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Nothing between us was ever planned-not even you. We were both 24 years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage parents. With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we planned to marry. Marriage was presented to us as a shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and I knew too many ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f5ee5e6
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d851d5e
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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, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c773ed0
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An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers--even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of ..
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political-consciousness
questioning-authority
questioning-beliefs
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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19c1306
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For that particular community, for my community, the massage has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people - acted out by white people, on white people's terms - in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to ru..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aff8df7
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Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real--when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hu..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9ecd495
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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44b5502
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I almost never danced, as much as I wanted to. I was crippled by some childhood fear of my own body.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1408dd0
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She knew that I had no idea how close I was, would always be, to the edge, how easily boys like me were erased in absurd, impractical ways. One minute we were tossing snowballs at taxis, firing up in front the 7-Eleven, speeding down side streets and the next we're surrounded by unholstered guns, a false move away from going down. I would always be a false move away. I would always have the dagger at my throat.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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91e12ab
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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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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de6c801
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Nothing between us was ever planned - not even you. We were both twenty-four years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we found ourselves, we ranked as teenage parents. With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we planned to marry. Marriage was presented to us as a shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and I knew too..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0894ebe
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The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.
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urban-poetry
street-music
rap
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2a20f61
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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 children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehorses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them in..
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reconciliation
justice
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1f25096
|
Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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026267f
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Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
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wealth
wealth-gap
wealth-management
white-guilt
institutionalized-racism
reparations
wealth-creation
whiteness
black-history
us-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bc7586c
|
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 and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. "Keep my name out your mouth," they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d801971
|
The crews, the young men who'd transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cdaafc4
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But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor - landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before - that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else's dream.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7728225
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Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be "twice as good." Hence the need for a special "talk" administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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82aac90
|
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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308a77d
|
In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5020a55
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You and I, my son, are that "below." That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy indepe..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fa02376
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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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a1e8527
|
What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: 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. And that is the deeper meaning of your name--that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1f2b483
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I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them. Some years after I'd left school, after I'd dropped out of college, I heard a few lines from Nas that struck me: Ecstasy, coke, you say it's love, it is poison Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison That was exactly how I felt back th..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1fcfe07
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Each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals. The moment the officers began their pursuit of Prince Jones, his life was in danger. The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |