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" I have never read 'To Kill A Mockingbird.' "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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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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" We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory. "

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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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" To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world. "

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

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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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" I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me. "

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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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" I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done. "

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" The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars - all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people. "

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" In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. "

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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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" 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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" There's a long tradition of black folks pleading with white people. It's a tradition that emerges from political necessity, so I get it; I'm just not very interested in it. "

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" I don't completely understand why people in Aspen want to hear what I have to say. "

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" The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history. Much of that violence, at least to some extent, you know, done by the very state that's supposed to protect them. "

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