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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore—not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-’90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

Institutions of Uppity Learning

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Feb 27 2012, 10:00 AM ET Comment

Rick Santorum talks to Real America:

"President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob," said the former senator from Pennsylvania. "There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image."

Yes.

As many of you know the liberal college plantation once tried to enslave me with their Foucault, and their Dante, and their rules of proper punctuation. They tried  to indoctrinate me with their cell division, and their subject-verb agreement. They feared me because I knew the important things--like both branches of government, the first colony to rise up against the British. (Everyone knows it was Texas.)

But I escaped, bringing my wife with me into freedom. I am now generally regarded as the Harriet Tubman of college dropouts. I tell you I have freed many slaves, and I would have freed a lot more had they known which books to burn. (All of them.)





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