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" You don't make a case for reparations thinking, 'Oh yeah, people are gonna love this.' I didn't see that coming. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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" Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that's a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time. "

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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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" When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad. "

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" You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do. "

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" In the 1930s and the 1940s, we set up the FHA. We set up the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. We set up specific bureaus to make our communities look the way they look. "

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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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