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"There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can't, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away."
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"The airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan - it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves."
"The problem is that rich are getting richer by not giving and poor and getting poorer by not receiving."
"There is a very simple relationship between increased socioeconomic rifts in the society and increased violence, criminality, war, increased lack of trust between people, health problems and social exclusion - but it seems to be very difficult for people to understand this simple relationship."
"The unemployment rate is still twice as high for blacks as for whites."
"Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it's bred indifference."
"Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women (you take a 7 percent pay cut, on average, just for getting hitched); married women do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women do; married women are significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to die a violent death than single women-usually at the hands of a husband, which raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person in the average woman's life is her own man."
"Why we are hanging around with inequality concept every day, it is like comparing water with the bread."
"Our world needs brutality and cruelty to sustain its equality and justice. Without it, handsome guys and beautiful ladies will fuck everyone they want. And we all ugly people will wait holding our dicks in our hands."
"Oppression has been in existence as long as man himself has been in existence."
"When the rich and the powerful rise they leave the powerless and the poor without possibility."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all."
"The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter."
"Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much."
"Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time."
"Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church."
"Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected."
"There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally."
"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."
"I thought of the great spectrum of The Mecca - black people from Belize, black people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers from Bangalore, black people from Toronto and Kingston, black people who spoke Russian, who spoke Spanish, who played Mongo SantamarAa, who understood mathematics and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the enslaved. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I wanted 'Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus' to immediately be obvious to you."
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