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My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008)

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Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.

Between the World and Me (2015)

The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

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You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery.

Some part of us believes in nonviolence not as an ideal worth striving for, but as a fairy tale passed on to the politically weak.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ta-Nehisi Coates (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.