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d06e47c
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The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated "A," indicated "in demand" neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked "a single foreigner or Negro." These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated "D" and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored i..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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18819fe
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It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery--chief among them, its flag--still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of "freedom." It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d267a5a
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The civil rights generation is exiting the American stage--not in a haze of nostalgia but in a cloud of gloom, troubled by the persistence of racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following in its wake, and the seeming indifference of much of the country to black America's fate.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8463abd
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I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber," Frederick Douglass told his audiences. "I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b37ca1f
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Five years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called "one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse" invited the damnation of history. Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f187701
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The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f8ef90f
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this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find a way to live within the all of it
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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eeff58d
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It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump--to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent's father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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613fb8c
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I came up in segregated West Baltimore. I understood black as a culture--as Etta James, jumping the broom, the Electric Slide. I understood the history and the politics, the debilitating effects of racism. But I did not understand blackness as a minority until I was an "only," until I was a young man walking into rooms filled with people who did not look like me. In many ways, segregation protected me--to this day, I've never been called a ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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dc9e8b6
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Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country's blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North's long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from th..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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319e107
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She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I wa..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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99fa620
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The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn aro..
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war
georgia
good-negro-government
theories-of-race
us-civil-war
confederacy
white-supremacy
race
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0ab3c53
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He counseled vigilance, "because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incoming administration, like my administration, takes the constraints on how we deal with U.S. citizens and persons seriously." This answer did not fill me with confidence. The next day, President-Elect Trump offered Lieutenant General Michael Fly..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3fa180b
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Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all of its affairs--the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food, the future of it..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9c5f3d3
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I also saw that those charged with analyzing the import of Obama's blackness were, in the main, working off of an old script. Obama was dubbed "The new Tiger Woods of American Politics," as a man who wasn't exactly black. I understood the point. Obama was not black as these writers understood black. It wasn't just that he wasn't a drug dealer like most black men on the news, but that he did not hail from an inner city, he was not raise on c..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c2595cd
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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 flaws of humanity, has done to the world.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b0e72c1
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They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f2ab624
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These efforts curtailed the ability of black people to buy better housing, to move to better neighborhoods, and to build wealth. Also, by confining black people to the same neighborhoods, these efforts ensured that people who were discriminated against, and hence had little, tended to be neighbors only with others who also had little. Thus while an individual in that community might be high-achieving, even high-earning, his or her ability t..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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781bd7e
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The notion that the Tea Party represented the righteous, if unfocused, anger of an aggrieved class allowed everyone from leftists to neoliberals to white nationalists to avoid a horrifying and simple reality: A significant swath of this country did not like the fact that their president was black, and that swath was not composed of those most damaged by an unquestioned faith in the markets. Far better to imagine the grievance put upon the p..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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28dd283
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The Negro Family" is a flawed work in part because it is a fundamentally sexist document that promotes the importance not just of family but of patriarchy, arguing that black men should be empowered at the expense of black women. "Men must have jobs," Moynihan wrote to President Johnson in 1965. "We must not rest until every able-bodied Negro male is working. Even if we have to displace some females." Moynihan was evidently unconcerned that..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5df3ee9
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For now the country holds to the common theory that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive, a fraught and still-incomplete resolution of the accidental hypocrisy of a nation founded by slaveholders extolling a gospel of freedom... Conveniently, it holds the possibility of ultimate resolution, for if right-thinking individuals can dedicate themselves to finishing the work of ensuring freedom for all, then perhaps the ghosts of history..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1af020a
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rights of whites were largely seen as dependent on the degradation of blacks.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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11bd1e6
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It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, "If a black man can be president, then any white man--no matter how fallen--can be president."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7485ef3
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In 1966, Richard Nixon picked up the charge, linking rising crime rates to Martin Luther King's campaign of civil disobedience. The decline of law and order "can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to obey them." The cure, as Nixon saw it, was not addressing criminogenic conditions, but locking up more people. "Doubling th..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7a6b87c
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Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration "widened the income gap between white and black Americans,"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3a5b580
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Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world. There is no evidence that the score is ever evened in this life or any after.
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good-and-evil
suffering
history
good
religion
god
evil
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ce33a02
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Over the next twelve years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal--the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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35d1ea0
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But what I remember most is the sense of impossibility with which Obama regarded the Trump presidency. I confess to basically feeling the same. It seemed to me that white people, if only out of an instinct for self-preservation, would reject Donald Trump. If there was a difference between me and the president, it was that I thought Trump wouldn't win, whereas Obama thought, categorically, that he couldn't. What amazes me thinking back on th..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3afbbaa
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It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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827c8a4
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For now the country holds to the common theory that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive, a fraught and still-incomplete resolution of the accidental hypocrisy of a nation founded by slaveholders extolling a gospel of freedom. This common theory dominates much of American discourse, from left to right.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8fb1962
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For Americans, the hardest part of paying reparations would not be the outlay of money. It would be acknowledging that their most cherished myth was not real.
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slavery
reparations
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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798757d
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From the White House down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr had a father,. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e8f3d2e
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Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world. There is no evidence that the score is ever evened in this life or any after. The barbarian Andrew Jackson rejoiced in mass murder, regaled in enslavement, and died a national hero. For thr..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6bf1872
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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 t he larger story of America and the world does not end well. Our story is a tragedy.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6fd07e7
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If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a telev..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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db19f76
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In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: It had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and expand, the right to own other people. The mass bloodletting shocked the senses. At the war's start, Senator James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina, believing that casualties would be minimal, claimed he would drink all the blood shed in the comin..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9716b0e
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It is important to remember the inconsequence of one's talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate. I knew it even as it was happening. I felt that I had not changed, but the world was changing around me. It was as if I had spent my years jiggling a key into the wrong lock. The lock was changed.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2b6e77d
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My understanding of the world was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0310085
|
A year after I watched the boy with the small eyes pull out a gun, my father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5844b5c
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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? And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for Municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the bigges..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2f33b60
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Here is what I would like 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 reg..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c21c675
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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 independent of cannibalism. But
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3c2943f
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It was like falling in love--the things that get you are so small, the things that keep you up at night are so particular to you that when you try to explain, the only reward anyone can give you is a dumb polite nod.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b62a194
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would live down here among my losses, among the muck and mess of it, before I would ever live among those who are in their own kind of muck, but are so blinded by it they fancy it pure. Ain't no pure, Robert. Ain't no clean.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |