Quotes About Oppression

So that is why the extremists try to keep girls from going to school? That is the reason we are poisoned and beaten, and our teachers threatened and killed?

When the State silences freedom of assembly and freedom to dissent, it silences the people it is sworn to protect.

An erect building is a shackled slave. I hear the mutinous grumbling of vertical buildings. I hear the grinding frustration of those compelled against their will to remain standing. A building is energy crucified against space and time.

The white man knows how to make everything," he said, "but he does not know how to distribute it.

The agreement an Indian makes to a United States treaty, is like the agreement a buffalo makes with his hunter when pierced with arrows. All he can do is lie down and give in.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.

And if the readers of this book should ever chance to see the poverty, the hopelessness, and the squalor of a modern Indian reservation, they may find it possible to truly understand the reasons why.

The most common lesson of history is that the butchery of one mass of people by another is, in the minds of the butchers, sanctioned by their god.

If you give a poor man an acre of land around his house, he will be pleased and stay there for life. Build a wall around that acre, however, and all he will want is to escape.

Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ's body.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Despite their marriage license and four children, black couples were not permitted to live as man and wife on the Reservation.

Beautiful women like Julia have a hard hand to play, so much is projected on to them, they get bulldozed all the time.

We didn't create society for men, we created it to stop men.

More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

seems to be that at some level of consciousness, Whites realize that they have lived lies of self-deception and that they do hold responsibility for the current oppression of people of color in the United States, whether through action or inaction (Helms, 1992; Spanierman, Poteat, Beer & Armstrong, 2006; Tatum, 1992).

The European colonization efforts toward the Americas, for example, operated from the assumption that the enculturation of indigenous peoples was justified because European culture was superior (Barongan et al., 1997). Forcing the colonized to adopt European beliefs and customs was seen as civilizing them.

if Whiteness, as unearned privilege and advantage, is predicated on White supremacy and the oppression of people of color and if Whites benefit from it, then a frightening conclusion must be drawn: Whites have a stake in racism and to be White is to benefit from racism (Wise, 2002). Little wonder then that race talk is threatening and that many Whites avoid it in order not to reach this conclusion.

To understand the dilemma faced by people of color in race talk we must first become aware of (a) the situational context of oppression that they live under, (b) the ensuing psychological costs associated with racism, and (c) the negative personal and group consequences for breaking their silence.

The irrational sense of entitlement is a dominant feature of White privilege (McIntosh, 2002).

Many White Americans, however, have distorted and or conveniently used color blindness as a means of color denial or, more accurately, power denial (Neville, Awad, Brooks, Flores, & Bluemel, 2013). An understanding of White privilege ultimately unmasks a dirty secret kept hidden by White Americans: Much of what they have attained is unearned, and even if they are not overtly racist, Whites cannot choose to relinquish benefits from it.