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Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil QUOTES

Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil QUOTES

1 " There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany's lead [in dealing with it's past human rights crimes]. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust the democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations' media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

2 " Tribalism will always make your world smaller; universalism is the only way to expand it. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

3 " The line from Southern hatred of Reconstruction to Southern opposition to government programs is a straight one, though it’s rarely explicitly drawn. So Mississippi prefers potholes that can ruin your wheels in its capital, and schools that leave their graduates illiterate in its countryside, to imposing taxes that might fix them. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

4 " I have always been wary of Black History Months and women’s studies departments, believing they confine their subjects to reconstructed ghettos. Of interest to black people. Good work for a woman. Those are the unspoken but absolute assumptions such programs unintentionally reinforce. I want to live in a world where everyone who studies American history reads Frederick Douglass and everyone who studies English reads George Eliot—just to stay with the nineteenth century. If they are cloistered, another generation will grow up thinking they can learn American history without Douglass, English literature without Eliot. Intellectual segregation is no better than any other kind. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

5 " The historian Howard Zinn’s remarks about the South make sense: it is “not the antithesis but the essence of American society which could therefore function as a mirror in which the nation can see its own blemishes magnified.”6 If the South is a mirror, Mississippi is a microscope. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

6 " Clearly the students had been learning about racism—far away, and in another country "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

7 " Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols, and many symbols involve remembering the dead. Which heroes do we valorize, which victims do we mourn? The United States has hundreds of monuments depicting a noble-looking Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army. In 2018, Bryan Stevenson dedicated a national monument to honor the victims of lynching, but where are the national monuments to the freedom fighter John Brown—or at least to Harriet Tubman? There are no monuments to the Nazis in Germany, East or West, but only after reunification did West Germany build significant monuments to the victims. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

8 " While systematic racism infects processes and affects lives all over America, Southern awareness of history makes it impossible to ignore. Moreover, the influence of the South on American political culture is disproportionate to the size of the region. Focusing on the Deep South is not a matter of ignoring the rest of the country, but "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

9 " His mother claims she didn’t know anything about the racist terror going on in Mississippi and Alabama; she was caught up in joining a sorority, not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world. Or around the corner. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

10 " Just how much life is left in Confederate ghosts became clear to the world, at the latest, with the election of Donald J. Trump. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

11 " She was ten years old. “That’s about the age when people start deforming their consciences in order to accept something that’s not just manifestly wrong but manifestly contrary to the religious beliefs that are front and center in their lives.” Like Bettina Stangneth or Jan Philipp Reemtsma or David Person, Diane McWhorter cannot say why her conscience resisted attempts to deform it. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

12 " The desire for regional innocence is so powerful that every single Klan witness at the Birmingham bombing trial in 2001 said under oath that he never had any bad feelings about black people. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

13 " The philosopher Janna Thompson has argued that obligations to right historical wrongs persist indefinitely, if not eternally. She believes that keeping transgenerational commitments, implicit or not, is the central moral and political good that gives nations the basis for trust. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

14 " The rise of the Tea Party following Obama’s first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America’s psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who’d never fully faced American darkness. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

15 " How many knots can the psyche tie itself into to defend itself against moral truth? "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

16 " The capacity to return hate with love wipes reason off the map, at least for a while. I cannot understand it any more than I can understand how, knowing that story, black churches across America continue to open their doors and their hearts to white strangers again and again. What love and courage. What courage and love. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

17 " During a 2015 meeting with representatives of those countries, a European Union official dismissed their claims with the words, “We cannot correct history. What happened, happened.” One wishes he’d read Améry: “What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

18 " It’s still not clear that the South lost the war,” said Diane. “It’s driving the national agenda, after all. You can see it with Trump; that’s the same population who elected George Wallace. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

19 " If Obama was the American dream—“Nowhere else on earth would my story be possible”—Trump is the American nightmare. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

20 " rise of the Tea Party following Obama’s first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America’s psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who’d never fully faced American darkness. "

― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil