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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. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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" If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation. "

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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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" We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me. "

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" There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that. "

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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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" I feel some need to represent where I'm from. But ultimately, I think my only real responsibility is to - as much as possible - interrogate my own truths. This is to say not merely writing what I think is true, but using the writing to turn that alleged truth over and over, to stress-test it, in the aim of producing something readable. "

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" I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere. "

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" Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book. "

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" I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book. "

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

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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 mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited. "

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

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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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" Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows - and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. "

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Black And White

" I've been very, very careful to tell people what I am qualified to talk about and what I'm not qualified to talk about. "

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

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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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" 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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" It is said that Obama speaks 'professorially,' a fact that understates the quickness and agility of his mind. "

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" I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened. "

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" The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite. "

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" You don't actually have control of the position people want you to be in. If they say, 'You king of the blacks,' you're king of the blacks - whether you like it or not. "

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" The symbolic power of Barack Obama's presidency - that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons taking up residence in the castle - assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries. "

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" One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition. "

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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. "

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" I guess I'd be put in the ID politics camp. But there is really nothing in the world-view of, say, Bernie Sanders I actually disagree with. I'd like a guaranteed income, single-payer health care, a stronger safety net, etc. The problem is the temptation to paper over historically fraught issues to achieve that is tempting. "

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" I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates