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" American myths have never been colorless. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
American
Myths
Never
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" There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life. "
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" The process of getting conscious, for me, was a very, very uncomfortable, disturbing, and sometimes physically painful process. And so that's the standard to which I write, because it was what I've experienced over my time. "
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" I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.' "
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" Fighting, I guess, was never the real reason I read comic books as a kid. The fighting was an important part, an integral part of it; I don't know I would've read it without it. "
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" The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that. "
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" White supremacy is a very, very popular and trenchant belief in this country's history and heritage. "
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" When you know that people know who you are, you are always working - and not the work you want to do. You are sort of performing, because you know they are looking - or at least glancing - at you. "
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" The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited. "
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" The president of the United States is not a king. You know? Barack Obama was elected by the American people. "
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American
People
" African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning. "
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" I wasn't the biggest Captain America fan, but increasingly, I see him as a great character. Winter Soldier really got into what it meant to actually represent America. "
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" If you are attempting to study American history, and you don't understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America. "
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White
You
" If your response to the first black president is to say they weren't born in this country... you might be a white supremacist. "
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White
Country
" I'm not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton's neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it's there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation. "
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Wish
Black
Choice
" In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. "
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Heritage
Black
Destroy
" Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity. "
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" You can't tolerate anybody attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with force. "
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Respond
" Throughout his eight years in office, Barack Obama endured a campaign of illegitimacy waged either by pluralities or majorities of the Republican party. Donald Trump rooted his candidacy in that campaign. It's fairly obvious. "
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Party
Office
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" You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do. "
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Facts
Know
Really
" Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. And many of those folks also, at the very least, gave land to African Americans when they were liberated. "
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" Typically, there's this perspective among writers - and black writers: there's this idea that there is one person - and maybe beyond writers - among blacks, there is always one person who everyone should go to learn about all things black. "
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" The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration. "
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" I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do. "
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" Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that's a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time. "
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Time
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" With George Bush's policies, I could make an argument for how they affect black people in a negative way. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't argue that he's a white supremacist. "
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Know
" As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children's lifetime or even in their grandchildren's lifetime. So fatalism isn't really an option. "
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" Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi. "
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Flag
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War
" The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in. "
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" People sort of went crazy when 'BTWAM' came out. I'm happy a bunch of people read it. I'm happy it touched so many people. I'm less happy that it became an object for certain folks or was discussed that way. I'm less happy that journalists started scrolling through my kid's Instagram account. "
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Started
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" I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, and I would cut on the TV, and I would watch a show like 'The Wonder Years,' or I would watch, you know, some other show like 'Family Ties.' "
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