Quotes from Susan Neiman

Social justice activists in the South, for example, who are struggling to force their neighbors to face the ways their racist history informs the racist present, are above all aware of how hard it all is. The acknowledgments are too defensive, the racism too tenacious, the impulse to insist on one's own victimization too

Social justice activists in the South, for example, who are struggling to force their neighbors to face the ways their racist history informs the racist present, are above all aware of how hard it all is. The acknowledgments are too defensive, the racism too tenacious, the impulse to insist on one's own victimization too strong.

We are historical beings, unable to describe ourselves without describing ourselves in space and time.

Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.

The focus on Auschwitz is a form of displacement for what we don't want to know about our own national crimes.

What drives me nuts about Southern Republicans," said Wilson, "is the way they rail against the federal government while taking more federal tax money than any other part of the country.

Shortly after the war's end, posters went up all over the British and American zones [in Berlin]. Under a photograph of corpses at Bergen-Belsen was printed the sentence THIS IS YOUR FAULT.

The nation must achieve a coherent and widely accepted national narrative. Here language is front and center. ... Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols. ... Narratives are transported through education.

How we remember the past constrains the possibilities we consider for the future.

If the name Ole Miss evokes football fields and magnolias for its alumni, it evokes tear gas and shotguns for others.

Before you can learn anything else, your teachers must have taught you that your voice matters.

The achievements of Obama's presidency, especially impressive in the face of massive opposition to every move he made, undermined the last rationalizations for white supremacy—which is just what provoked the massive backlash that led to the election of the least qualified man ever to approach the White House.

I will argue that the 2016 election resulted, in large part, from America's failure to confront its own history.

Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to.

African American history in all its torment and glory is American history, and we cannot move forward until all Americans see it that way.

Monuments are not about history; they are values made visible.

All those stately columns gracing mansion porticoes look elegant till you know what ideology was written into the architecture.

How could a good God create a world full of innocent suffering?

how can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms?

inexhaustible effort that philosophers devote to a subject that brings no results.

As Cummings pointed out when the museum opened in 2014, there are more Holocaust museums in the United States than in Israel, Germany, and Poland combined, but not one devoted to slavery.

cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here.

And there's no doubt that the presence of a black family in the White House enraged a sufficient number of Americans to insure the election of a swindling, violent successor whose policies, such as they are, are at odds with the interests of all but a handful of billionaires.

The stumbling stones document what larger memorials cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here.