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Any claim to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me (2015)

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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.