There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.
Ta-Nehisi CoatesRead
I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of understanding how nations confront their historical injustices through storytelling.
Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses the desire of a journalist to explore different countries that have faced and grappled with their past. By focusing on their successes and failures in dealing with historical injustices, he highlights the significance of storytelling in understanding the processes of reconciliation and healing within societies.
In practice
This quote could inspire discussions in a seminar about the role of journalism in historical narratives.
There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.
We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
I never expected my writing to become as popular as it did.
It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.
If I could have anything - you know, and this is across the board for any presidential candidate - I would have a greater acknowledgment of history in our policy and in our affairs.
You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less.
There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.
But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.
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