Quotes About Oppression

Baldwin put it this way in No Name in the Street: "One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.

White people deserved whatever happened to them, he said. The problem is that we don't deserve any of it.

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation," he wrote.

the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by

black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life.

When a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution." That threat to the

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian. For Baldwin, the accumulation of lies suffocated the white southerner.

The lynched relative; the buried son or daughter killed at the hands of the police; the millions locked away to rot in prisons; the children languishing in failed schools; the smothering, concentrated poverty passed down from generation to generation; and the indifference to lives lived in the shadows of the American dream are generally understood as exceptions to the American story, not the rule. Blasphemous facts must be banished from view by a host of public rituals and incantations.

My mom's messed up," his mom said. "The nuns messed her up. They made her think everything Indian was evil. And that includes you and me.

Freedom is ugly, but is much more beautiful than slavery.

The whites that wanted to live like the blacks were as immoral as you could imagine. Ask any black and they will tell you that you haven't lived until you have been a nigger on a Saturday night.

A man without fear cannot be a slave.

Convention (is) so often a mask for injustice.

It was as if she had once been almost smothered and then allowed to live only if she limited her vocabulary and breathed hardly at all.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

A rapacious and licentious soldiery.

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.

Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny.

The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

The wise determine from the gravity of the case the irritable, from sensibility to oppression the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

Kings will be tyrants by policy when subjects are rebels from principle.