Quotes About Oppression

I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I've been called that... Integrating that bus wouldn't mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.

I was born on an island with 96 percent of the people black. But all the power and the economy was in the hands of white people who only formed four per cent.

The fact that apartheid has been tied up with white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and deliberate oppression makes the problem much more complex. Material want is bad enough, but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.

The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.

What white man can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Everybody wants to talk about black and white, when the situation is really about rich people against poor people.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.

The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.

Racism has two primary functions: the oppression of people of color, which most people recognize, but also the simultaneous elevation of white people. You can't hold one group down without lifting the other up.

White Americans today don't know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that's where they made their mistake... they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.

You can be poor, middle class, or rich - it doesn't matter. The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you've never been oppressed. Flash the black card, and most white people will cower.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

The white man is destroying the world.

The Republicans always do a good job of dividing and conquering. They do a really good job of making black folks, poor white folks, and Hispanics not like each other.

During past years, like frightened children, we were afraid to eat the strong meat of human rights and instead sucked the milk of civil rights from the breasts of white liberals, black Uncle Toms, and Aunt Jemimas.

In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry 'Native passes' issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine.

Baby, black promoters oppressed me before white promoters ever got hold of me. Don't talk skin to me.

I have been refused entrance on the buses because I would not pay my fare at the front and go around to the rear door to enter. That was the custom if the bus was crowded up to the point where the white passengers would start occupying.

I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro.

We have a history in South Africa of an entrenched white monopoly capital.

The further away you get from being a straight white man, the less freedoms you have to figure out who you are and negotiate what you mean to society.