Quotes About Oppression

It is always open season on Christian and on white folks because they are the group you can kick and you can get away with it. It is politically correct.

When you teach black people that they are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent, and as a result you defer to the white supremacist status quo, you rationalize your accommodation to the status quo, you lose your fire, you become much more tied to producing foliage, what appears to be the case.

I've always hated being hemmed in or seeing anybody being hemmed in. Even when I was the smallest child, I couldn't bear being told I couldn't drink at a so-called white drinking fountain.

Being white is a job in America. You take that away, you better get the soldiers out.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

We don't consider the battle has ended in Afghanistan... The battle has begun and its fires are picking up. These fires will reach the White House, because it is the center of injustice and tyranny.

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

From the U.S. Capitol Building to the White House, our national symbols that represent freedom to so many of us, were built by people who were anything but free.

I can understand the Chinese Wall: it was built as a defense against marauders. But a wall such as that in Berlin, built to prevent people from seeking freedom, is almost beyond comprehension.

My experience and research has led me to the regrettable conclusion that our system of mass incarceration functions more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control.

What is the price of justice? What is the price of justice? When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor. Not because they're a danger or a flight risk - only because they are poor. They don't have money to get out of jail and they certainly don't have money to flee anywhere.

It is plain that we don't care about our poor people except to exploit them as cheap labor and victimize them through excessive rents and consumer prices.

A man who is without capital, and who, by prohibitions upon banking, is practically forbidden to hire any, is in a condition elevated but one degree above that of a chattel slave. He may live; but he can live only as the servant of others; compelled to perform such labor, and to perform it at such prices, as they may see fit to dictate.

Foot-binding, which started out as a fashionable impulse, became an expression of Han identity after the Mongols invaded China in 1279. The fact that it was only performed by Chinese women turned the practice into a kind of shorthand for ethnic pride.

Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.

The greatest block today in the way of woman's emancipation is the church, the canon law, the Bible and the priesthood.

People have been killing because of racial differences since the time of Adam and Eve, but in this country racism has been primarily aimed at African Americans.

If people think that women only wear the burqa because of coercive pressure, let them create ample opportunities for them, at the same time enforce laws making primary and secondary education compulsory, and then see what women actually do.

Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known.

Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes.

I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo... imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways... that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

Hitting someone with a shoe is in principle anti-Dalit. If you investigate stories about hitting someone with a shoe, you will find that this sort of language was used only by those who were upper-caste.

Slavery is perhaps the greatest affront to the fundamental principle of individual liberty.