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" I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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" One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy. "

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" It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary. "

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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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" I had no expectations of white people at all. "

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" Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. "

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" You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less. "

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" When you write, you're inside the project. You can't really think about the reception. It has to be worth it even if no one reads it. "

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" We had particular policies in this country that resulted in the larger share of poverty that we have in African-American communities. "

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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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" 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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" Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected. "

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" There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people. "

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" Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols. "

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" I get really, really concerned when I see somebody, taking $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, will not release what they're actually saying. That's concerning. "

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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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" My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.' "

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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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" 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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" For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary. "

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" I don't attempt to make people uncomfortable; I think that my standards in terms of art and journalism always have necessitated my discomfort. "

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" It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself. "

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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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" With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. "

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" Racism is a physical experience. "

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" The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time. "

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" Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much. "

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" I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad. "

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" I love living around black people. Home is home. We suffer under racism and the physical deprivations that come with that, but beneath that, we form cultures and traditions that are beautiful. "

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" I try to write in a way that makes people feel things. "

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