It’s been five years since Ta-Nehisi Coates’s groundbreaking The Case for Reparations ran in The Atlantic; yesterday, Coates appeared before Congress to celebrate Juneteenth with a barn-burning statement that starts as a response to Mitch McConnell’s dismissal of racial injustice in America, but quickly becomes more than that — a Coatesian masterclass in understanding race, America, history and the present moment.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama’s blackness, America’s white supremacy, and Trump’s victory
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 17,000-word history of the Obama presidency in the Atlantic is called “My President Was Black,” but it’s about the very special kind of blackness that Obama embodied — not because whites saw the biracial politician differently, but because Obama’s extraordinarily supportive white family and unique boyhood in Hawai’i spared him the racial trauma visited on other young black people in America.
Continue reading “Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama’s blackness, America’s white supremacy, and Trump’s victory”