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365dc8e
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To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear, The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, ..
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racism
police-brutality
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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713386d
|
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular. And you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings 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 eddys in the nearby stream, who loves her mother in ..
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slavery
history
black
race
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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80f6032
|
No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
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disappointment
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2e3a972
|
Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be?
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race-and-racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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41088af
|
An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality - it's a double standard.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b0f1746
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Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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374a48e
|
In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott. But increasingly, as we move..
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bilingualism
black-people
minorities
race-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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07920fa
|
Here is how I take the measure of my progress in life: I imagine myself as I was, back there in
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1af2251
|
There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can't prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.' Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn't preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting stru..
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racism
african-american-norms
black-culture
employment
structural-inequality
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fcf5060
|
We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cef4577
|
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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2bec8e5
|
Assessing Miller's rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation. Miller had, on some fundamental level, misunderstood the aims of the white men who sought to destroy Reconstruction. From Du Bois's perspective, the 1895 constitutional convention was not an exercise in moral reform, or an effort to purge the state of corruption. These were simply bywords embraced to cover for the restoration of a despotic white..
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negro-rule
reconstruction
w-e-b-du-bois
good-negro-government
south-carolina
american-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aa97aba
|
The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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17f204e
|
We meant well. We tried our best. "Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8ddb709
|
When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7c4f66d
|
You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets.
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inspirational-quotes
living
strength
life-lessons
life
inspirational
black-power
people-of-color
living-now
life-lessons-quotes
living-life
blackness
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c58d7f7
|
The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of the country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies--the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects--are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the Americ..
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police-brutality
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4fb7d59
|
To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ff83a47
|
But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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dd26e0a
|
Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ae635d6
|
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.' 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. There is some passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which, by the way, were not..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e80aeaa
|
In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama's genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who's worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offe..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4ca8d7e
|
If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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514d033
|
not just because of the black people swept away but because I know that "gentrification" is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime. To speak the word gentrification is to immediately lie. And I know, even in my anger, even as I writ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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35d2d62
|
It is by choice not chance...that we choose to advance, The Marshall Team; We can achieve...We will achieve.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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071156f
|
To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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dfe952b
|
They were the children of the Jackie Robinson elite, whose parents rose up out of the ghettos, and the sharecropping fields, went out into the suburbs, only to find that they carried the mark with them and could not escape. Even when they succeeded, as so many of them did, they were singled out, made examples of, transfigured into parables of diversity. They were symbols and markers, never children or young adults. And so they come to Howar..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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20e539c
|
This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.
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words-fail
words-fail-me
words-failed
moments
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f54fe2f
|
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate - the kind that HR 40 proposes - we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion - and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper - America's heritage, history, and standin..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0307a76
|
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success--and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-twentieth century, to federal policy.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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74d58da
|
I had not yet been to Gettysburg. I had not read Thavolia Glymph. All I had was the feeling, the weight. I did not yet know, and I do not fully know now. But part of what I know ist hat there is the burden of living among Dreamers, and there is the extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur. For their innocence, they nullify your anger, you..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f603e07
|
One must be without error out here. Walk in a single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra number 2 pencil. Make no mistakes. But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn't. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson - not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher is higher for you than it is for your co..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d3718b6
|
I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6a2ed14
|
But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn't. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson--not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e82f34d
|
It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bf7aab8
|
But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6066335
|
In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.
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institutional-oppression
slave-economy
kleptocracy
institutionalized-racism
land-ownership
american-history
black-history
us-history
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
5dce9b3
|
It was only after you that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4c85d47
|
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 will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted thems..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3e76b76
|
Bored whites were barbarian whites.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fa16d8b
|
A separate society within America would depend on the mechanisms of American wealth creation, and wealth in America has never been created in absence of government policy, of banks willing to lend and a justice system willing to protect, and so this separatist nationalism revealed itself to be as flawed as integration, in that it, too, ultimately depended on the good graces of white people.
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racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0777ec3
|
I was of the age when it was natural to seek out a wife, but by then I had seen tasking women promised to tasking men, and then seen how such "promises" were kept. I remember how these young couples would hold one another, each morning before going to their separate tasks, how they would clasp hands at night, sitting on the steps of their quarters, how they would fight and draw knives, kill each other, before being without each other, kill ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0ce5ed6
|
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 have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the d..
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racism
blackness
whiteness
american-history
black-history
racism-in-america
race
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
270b383
|
Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,' wrote Wiley. 'Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |