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" If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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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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" 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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" 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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" I think it's really important to be conscious of yourself and the world around you. For me, that meant reading a lot and reporting. "

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" My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK. "

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" It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place. "

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" If I could have anything - you know, and this is across the board for any presidential candidate - I would have a greater acknowledgment of history in our policy and in our affairs. "

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" In comics, you have to imagine what happens. I really loved it; I loved collecting. I loved following the adventures and figuring out what was going to happen next. I was a huge X-Men fan; I was a huge Spider-Man fan, and, to large degree, I remain one. It's literature for me; it's art. "

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" 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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" I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.' "

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" My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition. "

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" 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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" Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe. "

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" If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow. "

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" Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country. "

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" When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism. "

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" 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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" 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 never expected my writing to become as popular as it did. "

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" When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years. "

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" Comic books have a long, fraught history with sexism. "

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" The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too. "

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" It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true - his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. "

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" My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us. "

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" I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent. "

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