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" When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Know
Expectations
Black
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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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" My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition. "
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" There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos. "
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" You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere. "
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" I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere. "
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" It's kind of selfish to say that you're only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see. "
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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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" 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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" 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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" White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers. "
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" I am always surprised people are surprised that people haven't read things. "
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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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" 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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" 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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" 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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