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" White supremacy is a very, very popular and trenchant belief in this country's history and heritage. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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" I had to learn to not be so hard. And I had a wife and, at that time, a partner when Samori was born, and for most of Samori's life, a partner, who, for whatever reason, did not have to learn that and was very tender and very, very soft with him. "

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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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" 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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" Racism is a physical experience. "

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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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" 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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" Donald Trump begins his political career in birtherism. That idea is connected to a very, very old notion that African-Americans are not citizens. "

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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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" I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed. "

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" There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy. "

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" Amiri Baraka went to Howard. Lucille Clifton went to Howard. Ossie Davis went to Howard. And I was aware of that when I was there. Charles Drew went to Howard. Thurgood Marshall went to the law school. Being aware of that and having all of that brought to bear, again, it's one of those things that I can't really separate from my career as a writer. "

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

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

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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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" I try to write in a way that makes people feel things. "

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" There is some group of Americans who are really, really curious to understand how we ended up at this point, where every week it seems like you can turn on your TV and see some sort of abuse being heaped on black people. "

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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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" I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake. "

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

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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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" 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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" The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. "

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

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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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" People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time. "

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