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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0478cf2 | I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was--a gate to some other blue world. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a1b2958 | For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America's first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also a declaration of war. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e191741 | So there was nothing new in the suddenly transracial spirit that saw the country, in 2008, reaching "for the best part of itself." It had done so before--and then promptly retrenched in the worst part of itself. To see this connection, to see Obama's election as part of a familiar cycle, you would have had to understand how central the brand of white supremacy was to the country. I did not. I could remember, as a child, the nationalists cla.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7281ab8 | Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b955869 | Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them-- | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 56f1766 | The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 63f2388 | 1914, its first war on drugs,*13 passing the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine. The reasoning was unoriginal. "The use of cocaine by unfortunate women generally and by negroes in certain parts of the country is simply appalling," the American Pharmaceutical Association's Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit had concluded in 1902. The New York Times published an article by a physician sayi.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 10aad80 | Elijah Forrester, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, opposed the Eisenhower administration's 1956 civil rights bill on the grounds that "where segregation has been abolished," black villainy soon prospered.*16 "In the District of Columbia, the public parks have become of no utility whatever to the white race," Forrester claimed, "for they enter at the risk of assaults upon their person or the robbery of their personal effects." Unless s.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 727aeef | This story began, as all writing must, in failure. | opening-lines | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 262b830 | In the cities of the North, "European immigrants' struggle" for the credential of whiteness gave them the motive to oppress blacks, writes Christopher Muller, a sociologist at Columbia who studies incarceration: "A central way European immigrants advanced politically in the years preceding the first Great Migration was by securing patronage positions in municipal services such as law enforcement." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 552a138 | Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show ask me what it meant to loose my body. | opening-lines | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 24430c0 | America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional mor.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e61bef0 | By Obama's lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only "the United States of America." All these disparate strands of the American experience were bound together by a common hope: It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravel.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 39edec7 | You can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position," he said. "The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved. You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable--that can institutionalize the changes you seek--and to engage the other side." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| af9c514 | Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men. He blacks no masters boots, and bows the knee to no one save God alone. He receives higher wages for his labor, than does the laborer of any othe.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 44429f6 | Woodrow Wilson, when he addressed the crowd, did not mention slavery but asserted that the war's meaning could be found in "the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other's eyes." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9290600 | Just play this out as a thought experiment," he said. "Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America--but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America--is getting a really good education. And they're graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates th.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| aca55ae | I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster," he said. "And if you ask them, I'm sure they would say, 'No, actually what you're experiencing is not because you're black, it's because you're a Democrat.' " | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 131401f | But the underlying presumption--that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other--exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who'd won one competitive political race in her life, whose political instincts were questioned by her own advisers, who took more than half a million dollars in speaking fees from an investment bank because it was "what they offered," who proposed to bring back to the White House a former pr.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6928c32 | The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6416ce8 | Here is what I would like for 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.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9df0ef4 | A legacy of plunder, a network of laws and traditions, a heritage, a Dream, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity. "Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black .. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5245980 | rights gradually awarded to the mass of European poor and oppressed, at precisely the same time they were being stripped from enslaved Africans and their descendants. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e6e01e5 | White men," wrote Mississippi senator and eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, "have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill the position here occupied by the servile race." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 2282a4e | We are warriors." "And yet a moment ago, you were women." "Mother, I swear it, I am doing all I can." "And I am sorry, daughter, but you are going to have to do more." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 65a82f8 | African Americans understood they were at war, and reacted accordingly: running away, rebelling violently, fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and--less spectacularly, though more significantly--refusing to work, breaking tools, bending a Christian God to their own interpretation, stealing back the fruits of their labor, and, in covert corners of their world, committing themselves to the illegal act of learning to read. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e0848fb | Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war, and subsequently turned the antebellum South into a police state. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 2c2cc75 | Always lurking among Malcolm's condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion--"You're better than you think you are," he seemed to say to us. "Now act like it." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bcfa579 | In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| babbf76 | The noble white labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, nor bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America's original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price for even incremental gains for the white masses. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e0b3a20 | Son," my father said of Obama, "you know the country got to be messed up for them folks to give him the job." | racism politics presidents race-relations race | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 189c935 | The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face t.. | racism war slavery freedom race-relations race mythology | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 5307ec8 | Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime--the generational destruction of human bodies--and all of its related offenses--domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances .. | slavery history america whiteness american-history race-relations race exploitation | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 372ded7 | but talent is nothing without a field on which to display its gifts. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a25eca4 | He laughed, then continued, "The reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, '[Don't] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don't care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?' " | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7d073e1 | Trump truly is something new--the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his correct name and rightful honorific--America's first white president. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5b27e59 | 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.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 3c85015 | The symbolic power of Barack Obama's presidency--that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons from taking up residence in the castle--assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries. And it was that fear that gave the symbols Donald Trump deployed--the symbols of racism--enough potency to make him president, and thus put him in position to injure the world. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| fa1bb36 | When it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in some way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. And this is because, at its core, those American myths have never been colorless. They can not be extricated from the theory that a class of people carry peonage in their blood. That peon class provided the foundation on which all those myths and .. | racism | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 388cb3e | Americans, too belong to a class--one responsible for and intrinsically tied to a history of torture, bombings, and coups d'etat carried out in our name. And Trump has only heaped more upon the burden. In the global context, perhaps, we Americans are all white. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5994bdc | Even in those pieces that seemed to be casually tossed off, I was always searching for the right word, for the proper escape from the cliches that threatened every sentence, from truisms that threatened to steer me back into the sentimental dream. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a5fbddf | And now the lies of the Civil War and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave. America had a biography, and in that biography, the shackling of black people - slaves and free - featured prominently...what I sensed was a country trying to skip out on a bill, trying to stave off a terrible accounting. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e42a2cc | For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d3f49dc | My reasons for writing had to be my own, divorced from expectation. | Ta-Nehisi Coates |