Susan Sontag Quotes

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

The suggestion that Negroes should be treated as equals to white men woke some of the deepest and ugliest fears in the American mind

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

I don’t believe in Black majority rule ever—not even in 1000 years.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me.

Racial inequality is a big problem.

Racism may be as systemic as it always was. It is the great problem of America. It's the one stumbling block that I don't believe was ever smoothed over.

Race in America is not a problem you can go over, or around or under. You've got to go through it.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.

The worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers is ... the treatment of the Negro.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

Whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior.

Whites don’t like to see the nigger with too much … White people was afraid that money will make the nigger act like his own man.

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

To be a black in a white society isn’t to stand on level and equal ground. While the races may stand side be side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow. Until we overcome unequal history we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.

The colored people should not urge that they be placed on an equality with white people.

Although the race problem may seem to lie dormant at times, it continually exists, lives on and on and sometimes rages with all the fury of a jungle beast. It gnaws at the very vitals of our existence, in time it will sap our strength and destroy the greatness of our American way of life unless solved properly and permanently.

I do not question Mr. Lincoln's conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, [audience laughter] but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever

Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

We never discuss race until something bad happens.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.

A black person grows up in this country - and in many places - knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.