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ce56318
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In those days I would come out of the house, turn onto Flatbush Avenue, and my face would tighten like a Mexican wrestler's mask, my eyes would dart from corner to corner, my arms loose, limber, and ready. This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to prot..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a020623
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Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time.
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one-at-a-time
pragmatism
revolution
think-global-act-local
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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02efbd5
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In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.
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criminal
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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96ba07b
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The fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hand of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods. You cannot disconnect our emancipation in the Northern colonies from the blood spilled in the Revolutionary War, any more than you can discon..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8aba9b3
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And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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497dc49
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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. Slowly, I was discovering myself. The
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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05b2a0f
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The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me because, even then, in some inchoate form. I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.
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killing
murder
police
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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02bee00
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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 of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6a41ecf
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My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool.
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race-and-racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c457903
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Dad called it "enlightenment" but to me, it just felt lonely."
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family
fatherhood
loneliness
love
wisdom
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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574ce34
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I came to see the streets and the schools as 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. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in re..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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48a5cf9
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I think of your grandmother calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try to "test me." And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it come, as the total failure of fatherhood because if all I had over you were my hands, then I really had nothing at all."
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parenting
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9dd4352
|
Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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eae84e3
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There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the Sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that very racism, pinned into ghettos, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0c2ea17
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When people discuss the drug war, they are usually referring to the one that began in the 1970s, without realizing that this was, at least, our third drug war in the twentieth century. I found David F. Musto's The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control to be extremely helpful on the subject. It was depressing to see that drug wars, in this country, are almost never launched purely out of concern for public health. In almost every ins..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b71798f
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There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In the era of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifically, served as executioner that such deaths were often reported by the press as having happened "at the hands of persons unknown." In 1957, the white residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania, argued for their right to keep their town segregated. "As moral, religious and la..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a88c2ca
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I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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611e62b
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It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true--his ideology is white supremacy in all of its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican "rapists," only to be later revealed as a proud violator. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. It is thus appropriate that Trump's rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b7664d3
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As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you and said, "Come on!" Many things now happened at once. There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body. And more: There was my sense that this woman was pulling rank. I knew, for instance, that she would not have pushed a bl..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e44d871
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She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. "And we can't get the message," she said. "We don't understand that we are embracing our deaths."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ddbb19f
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I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d4ac3d2
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I grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. There was no room for softness. 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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ea33f5b
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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."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9da9db1
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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 coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder no just the bodies of humans but the body of Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It h..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b90c8b2
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The meek shall inherit the earth" meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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de1a114
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But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible--this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9b46b34
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The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this. To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing fields--the reduction of the black body--is no different than the premise that allowed for the murder of ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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59723b4
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And the history of civilization is littered with dead "races" (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose--the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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73e6be3
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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 as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dr..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8c5fac8
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Slavery is not an undefinable 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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a8c903a
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I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. 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 |
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faecee6
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There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9124dcd
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Among the people in that room, all those centuries ago, my body, breakable at will, endangered in the streets, fearful in the schools, was not closest to the queen's but to her adviser's, who'd been broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she'd ever seen, could sit.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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860d6c1
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One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aee0b61
|
We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design ..
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blacks
civil-rights-movement
race-relations
racism
whites
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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027d4ab
|
How do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d3c7494
|
I wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear--even apart from me. I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e7f421d
|
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism a la carte.
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black-history
democracy
freedom
slavery
slavery-in-the-united-states
us-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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02cba2a
|
You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9979525
|
You are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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00c2e7f
|
Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; 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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2b66d53
|
I tell you this because you must understand, no matter the point of our talk, that I didn't always have things, but I had people -- I always had people. I had a mother and father who I would match against any other. I had a brother who looked out for me all through college. I had The Mecca that directed me. I had friends who would leap in front of a bus for me. You need to know that I was loved, that whatever my lack of religious feeling, I..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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aa85cfa
|
Do not speak to me of martyrdom, of men who die to be remembered on some parish day. I don't believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like castanets will echo me. SONIA SANCHEZ
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3a87bf4
|
For so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |