Politics & Power Quote by Nina Simone

Nina Simone’s line lands like a sour note held on purpose: not a history lesson, a diagnosis. She’s refusing the feel-good civics version of abolition where a single legal act cleans the national conscience. By aiming at “America’s way of thinking,” she shifts the argument from policy to psyche, from chains to reflexes: who gets presumed dangerous, who gets presumed deserving, who gets listened to, who gets policed, who gets paid. It’s a statement about default settings.

The phrasing matters. “Never been abolished” is absolute, almost taunting, because Simone isn’t trying to win a debate; she’s trying to break a spell. The target is the quiet comfort of believing slavery is “over there” in the past, safely quarantined from the present. Her subtext is that freedom can be declared and still be rationed, that a country can outlaw ownership while keeping the habits of ownership: extraction, surveillance, humiliation, control.

Context sharpens the blade. Simone wasn’t speaking from an ivory tower; she was a Black woman watching the Civil Rights era’s promises collide with assassinations, backlash, and daily indignities. Her music and activism treated respectability as a trap and politeness as an accomplice. The quote functions like her songs often do: it turns personal anger into public clarity, insisting that racism isn’t merely a collection of individual prejudices but a cultural inheritance that keeps reproducing itself until it’s confronted as ideology, not just bad manners.