Politics & Power Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag isn’t offering a despairing mood; she’s issuing a cold diagnostic meant to puncture the comforting liberal story that progress is inevitable and consensus is just around the corner. The line turns on a blunt reversal: equality isn’t framed as something Black Americans must “earn” through respectability or patience, but as something white America must choose to grant - and, in her view, has repeatedly refused. That verb matters. It casts racism less as individual prejudice than as a political will, a collective decision embedded in institutions and habits.

The second sentence is deliberately incendiary: “passionately racist” denies the common alibi that racism is merely leftover ignorance, a fading residue from an earlier era. Passion suggests energy, pleasure, investment. Sontag is insisting that white supremacy isn’t just tolerated; it’s emotionally defended, culturally rehearsed, and periodically rejuvenated, especially when challenged by demands for structural change. The “foreseeable future” lands like a refusal of motivational poster optimism. It’s designed to make incrementalist rhetoric sound unserious, even complicit.

Contextually, this is Sontag in her characteristic mode: the intellectual as irritant, not consoling guide. She writes as a white public thinker confronting the limits of white liberalism - the tendency to admire civil rights as a moral tableau while resisting its material implications (power, housing, schools, policing). The quote works because it forces a question many audiences prefer to dodge: if equality requires white commitment, what happens when that commitment is absent, or conditional?