Danzy Senna Quotes

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this condition affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way...

About Author

Danzy Senna (born September 13, 1970) is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of six books and numerous essays about race, gender and American identity, including Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2003), New People (2017), and most recently Colored Television (2024). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vogue, and The New York Times. She is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

My father's subject: the relationship between history and the individual. He believes everybody is an 'excretion' of his or her environment. That's the word he uses. Excretion.

Something—to make something right and final—is to kill it.

She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and pov...

He seemed particularly insistent. I both did and didn’t want to be left alone at the house with my mother. There was an aching in my chest that surprised me, and my eyes were watering up against my wi...

I recalled a theory my father had concocted one night, while we sat in an Oakland juke joint sharing a plate of ribs. He'd said humor, above all else, was what bound each of us and separated each of u...

We were lying on our backs in the foothills, watching the sky and making a list called Never. All the things we would never do. Let's never get married. Let's never get fat. Let's never sleep with a m...

It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away...

My father tells me that the further you get away from an experience, the deeper it roots itself inside of you. Don't fool yourself, baby, he said. Time does not heal and history is not progressive.

Much privilege leads to bad manners,

He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, t...

I think the narcolepsy is adorable. Someday you'll be happy for these little lulls. Who the fuck wants a man to be awake all the time?

Looking at those photographs, I remembered how my parents had never said I love you to each other. How they had said only I miss you. At the time, I hadn’t been able to figure out what this meant. But...

Don't hate white people. They can't help it. They have a learning disability. They need your compassion. They need accommodations. They are like preschoolers--their understanding of race is so basic....

She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn’t fini...

We learn in school that the civil rights movement was about overcoming segregation. But as my father has pointed out to me, what an oddly neutral word - segregation to describe what was happening in t...

And very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field. Love, Gloria