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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a90d5cd | 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 relation - those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, "He should have stayed in school," and then wash its hands of him." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d156c7b | white innocence--the need to believe that whatever might befall the country, white America is ultimately blameless. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8193792 | The thing is, a black man can't be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that's still out there," Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama, told the journalist Gwen Ifill after the 2008 election. "However, an extraordinary, gifted, and talented young man who happens to be black can be president." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8018686 | Debating Abraham Lincoln during the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, Stephen Douglas asserted that "this government was made on the white basis" and that the Framers had made "no reference either to the Negro, the savage Indians, the Feejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cada4a5 | Racial attitudes had a significantly greater impact on health care opinions when framed as part of President Obama's plan than they had when the exact same policies were attributed to President Clinton's 1993 health care initiative. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6043aa4 | The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama's presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bfc78b7 | a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances--proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders--and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b71bfaf | But one reason Obama rose so quickly was that African Americans are war-weary. It was not simply the country at large that was tired of the old baby boomer debates. Blacks, too, were sick of talking about affirmative action and school busing. There was a broad sense that integration had failed us, and a growing disenchantment with our appointed spokespeople. Obama's primary triumphs in predominantly white states gave rise to rumors of a new.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6351267 | And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are relate-but cannot stand in for o.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 0a34597 | This part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers who felt my work ethic did not match my potential, of black college professors who taught me intellectual rigor. And they did this in a world that every day insulted their humanity. It was not so much that the black layabouts and deadbeats Oba.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f4e2165 | The older poets were Ethelbert Miller, Kenneth Carroll, Brian Gilmore. It is important that I tell you their names, that you know that I have never achieved anything alone. | poets theory poetry ta-nehisi-coates-quote | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| c5ee3a6 | So there was love, and specifically the desire to give to someone who had given so much to me. But too there was a need to liberate myself from old models. I did not want a good woman behind me, beside me, in front of me, or proximate to me in any of the old and maudlin ways. | marriage | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 3e7d936 | That families are better off the stronger and more stable they are is self-evidently important. But so is the notion that no family can ever be made impregnable, that families are social structures existing within larger social structures. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 194b038 | 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. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, and | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bd4d2a9 | The fact of Barack Obama, of Michelle Obama, changed our lives. Their very existence opened a market. It is important to say this, to say it in this ugly, inelegant way. 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 jig.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a9f9ae7 | The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes," charged the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, "is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we're seeing now." That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven int.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 57bee04 | I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related--but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal--a world more humane. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a9afe36 | I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next. | parenting | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 0e824de | It has been said that the first black presidency was mostly "symbolic," a dismissal that deeply underestimates the power of symbols. Symbols don't just represent reality but can become tools to change it." | symbols | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 6e80607 | The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating Obama. It was thought by Obama and others that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump's genius was understanding that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapi.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4f93e1b | In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that Russian interference in the election could only succeed where "necessary conditions" and an "existing background" were present. In America that "existing background" was a persistent racism and the "necessary condition" was the symbolic threat of a black president. The two related factors hobbled America's ability to safeguard its electoral system." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 21f6fe5 | The historian David M. Oshinsky notes in his book "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice that from 1900 to 1930, African Americans in Mississippi "comprised about 67 percent of the killers in Mississippi and 80 percent of the victims." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 0f9ee70 | I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal--a world more humane. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8a1904e | I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why--for us and only us--is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 41bedf7 | Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8f04688 | I did not love it, but I loved it. The fear I felt then was not just the anguish in my gut but the price of seeing the world anew. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| dada4e4 | Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception--let alone his ascendancy to the presidency--had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama--a black man with deep roots in the white world--was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 0d581b9 | there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it a such. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d0faad9 | They are going to kill us, so I shall speak as my dead self, which is my best self. | spirituality death confronting-death paradoxical-truths philosophical-paradox spiritual-philosophy wisdom-of-africa wisdom-of-the-higher-self women-warriors | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 16b98c3 | When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life... The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And 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. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cfda1ab | Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants--their homes, their hobbies--up close. I don't know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is tha.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| dbd91bb | But rage alone is aimless, untamed, inept. When what we need is . | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 74dcb61 | I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere back in Baltimore. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watch.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8dd5781 | In short, Obama, his family, and his administration were a walking advertisement for the ease with which black people could be fully integrated into the unthreatening mainstream of American culture, politics, and myth. And that was always the problem. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| abd93ae | But families don't exist independent of their environment. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9a5a050 | I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice. And what was the source of this fear? What was hiding behind the smoke screen of streets and schools? And what did it mean that number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the differ.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 12076d1 | No. How dare you . You were the guardian of throne and country. And now I, having cast aside my life for you, find the Dora Milaje and their capatain turned jambazi! What has come of you, Aneka? What of your oath to the nation? To ? | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 1ec3d9d | I had believed myself superior to my ancestors. But all it took was the proper amount of pain for me to return to the traditions of old. For even thinking such a thing, I am sorry. I apologize to you as a Wakandian, as a human being, and I apologize to my nation. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cd748d2 | But we were supposed to be exceptional." "Wakanda is exceptional, Baba. And now, more than ever, we need someone to remind us." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c1b8e51 | She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world--which is really the only world she can ever know--ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born i.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b4f6e61 | I am so very proud of you -- your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given -- a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not str.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| bc4a14d | The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And 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. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 646eb3b | At this moment the phrase "police reform" has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones a.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| ecbd2d5 | When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout .. | Ta-Nehisi Coates |