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" It is, I think, the very chaos of America that allowed me to prosper. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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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 had no expectations of white people at all. "

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" You had eight years before President Trump, a situation where the opposition party basically ran in opposition to the president on a platform of thinly based racism. That doesn't mean that the politicians themselves were outright racist, but when charges of birtherism came up, no one repudiated it. "

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" Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage. "

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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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" We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system. "

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" Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose. "

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" White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers. "

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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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" 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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" 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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" Black people are pledging their fealty to the state, and yet they aren't getting the same return. This is theft. It's systemized. "

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" I started writing regularly for 'The Atlantic' roughly around the time that Barack Obama got inaugurated. "

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" There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy. "

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" I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it. "

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" Abraham Lincoln was killed by the forces of white supremacy. "

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" When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything. "

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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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" 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 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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" To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. "

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

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" I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves. "

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" The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in. "

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" Like a lot of people, I'm very, very concerned about Senator Clinton's record. I'm very, very concerned about where her positions were in the 1990s, when we had some of the most disgusting legislation in terms of our criminal justice, really, in this country's history. "

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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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" When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else. "

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