Quotes About Oppression

If you read the 13th Amendment, it doesn't talk about narratives of racial difference. It doesn't talk about ideologies of white supremacy. It only talks about involuntary servitude and forced labor.

Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the 'liberating' kind.

corporate "confession of guilt." "The church," he declared, "confesses that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the

Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses.

His liberators were leaving the freedman to wither on the vine.

Public washrooms and water fountains were rigidly demarcated to prevent contaminating contact with the same people who cooked the white South's meals, cleaned its houses, and tended its children.

Who are the Communists?" "Russians who want to take away everything you have and work you like a slave.

The keynote of minority prejudice is this: They are loathed because they are feared.

If you are treated like dirt long enough, you begin to fell like dirt

You all know how black humor started? It started on slave ships. Cat was rowing and dude says, "What you laughin' about?" And he says, "Yesterday I was a king."

One of the more important books on American race relations of the past decade or more is Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, published in 2010.

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate

The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, sees you as a piece of real estate, just another fallow field lying underneath him like a sacrifice.

you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do

Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. 'Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn.

The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree".

That was the moment when I understood more clearly than ever before that the liberation struggle was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage, it was about liberating white people from fear.

Everybody feels oppressed during a Wagner performance. That is part of the appeal.

The real aim of colonialism was to control the people's wealth, what they produced, how they produced it," Ng?g? wa Thiong'o sees the way that control was introduced and managed was to deconstruct the people's sense of self and replace it with that of the colonizer. This would occur when a people's perception of themselves and their world was overthrown.

I gave them nothing back because all I knew was the vast amount they had taken from me, robbed me of, cheated me out of, all in the name of a God whose son bore the long hair none of us were allowed to wear any more.

Just as kingly rule is the best, so is the rule of the tyrant the worst.

Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like living in jail.

If we had been allowed to participate in the vital processes of America's national growth, what would have been the textures of our lives, the pattern of our traditions, the routine of our customs, the state of our arts, the code of our laws, the function of our government!… We black folk say that America would have been stronger and greater.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.