Contact
Privacy
Book: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Quotes of Book: We Were Eight Years in Power:
TOP TAGS :honorjanewise-wordsthornunderstandjennifer-l-armentroutbunnywhen-strangers-meet

  1. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
    book-quote

  2. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    So there was nothing new in the suddenly transracial spirit that saw the country, in 2008, reaching "for the best part of itself." It had done so before-and then promptly retrenched in the worst part of itself. To see this connection, to see Obama's election as part of a familiar cycle, you would have had to understand how central the brand of white supremacy was to the country. I did not.
    book-quote

  3. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language-as though he actually trusted them and believed in them.
    book-quote

  4. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent-an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, nigger justice reform that could be targeted for destruction, that could be targeted for redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white.
    book-quote

  5. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    Obama's greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition's resolve to destroy him.
    book-quote

  6. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    But Washington did this in the mid-1980s in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma.
    book-quote

  7. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    Obama's keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him. To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. That is the tradition to which the "skinny kid with a funny name" who would be president belonged.
    book-quote

  8. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    Instead, I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliation and transmute pain into rage. So I took the agony of that era like a collection notice and hid it away in the upper dresser of the mind, resolved to return to it when I had means to pay. I think now, today, I have settled almost all of those old accounts. But the ache and aftershock of failure remain long after the drawer is bare.
    book-quote

  9. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    When the homophobe says that same-sex marriage will alter the definition of marriage, he is still a homophobe but he is not a liar. The right of exclusion is part of his definition of an institution that is vital for him and gives his life meaning.
    book-quote

  10. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    If atheism is important to me, my sense of ancestry is its equal.
    book-quote

  11. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it.
    book-quote

  12. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ We Were Eight Years in Power:

    Indeed, if you're looking for a bridge, if you're looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same way, if you're looking for common ground, then it's true, we should be talking about Obama. But we should make sure we're talking about the right one.
    book-quote
Categories