Danzy Senna Quote

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 this country. We prefer it to more blunt descriptions of that social arrangement: subjugation, oppression. And perhaps, also, we don't want to acknowledge the ways in which we were not segregated at all, the ways in which the lives of black and white people have always been intertwined at the most intimate level. Slavery was intimate. Oppression is so often an act of intimacy.

Danzy Senna

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 this country. We prefer it to more blunt descriptions of that social arrangement: subjugation, oppression. And perhaps, also, we don't want to acknowledge the ways in which we were not segregated at all, the ways in which the lives of black and white people have always been intertwined at the most intimate level. Slavery was intimate. Oppression is so often an act of intimacy.

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About Danzy Senna

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.