Quotes About Oppression

There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems.

When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eye so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth!

The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors--in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition!...It is a miracle that the the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught here in white man's heaven!

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the I.R.S. all combined can't turn up a thing I got, beyond a car to drive and a seven-room house to live in.

If it is all right for black people to be drafted and sent to Korea or South Vietnam or Laos or Berlin or someplace else to fight and die for the white man, then there is nothing wrong with that same black man doing the same thing when he is under the brutality in this country at the hands of the white man.

As long as you around here wearing the white men's name bragging about this so called democracy, you will always be looked down up, by the rest of the world.

This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man's hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are "inferior"—and white people "superior"—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look "pretty" by white standards.

We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.

Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.

So we are all black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves.

White people seem to think the black man ought to be shouting 'hallelujah'! Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man's back—and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man's supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it's still going to leave a scar!

When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare. We haven't benefited from America's democracy. We've only suffered from America's hypocrisy.

And we intend to expand it from the level of civil rights to the level of human rights. As long as you fight it on the level of civil rights, you're under Uncle Sam's jurisdiction. You're going to his court expecting him to correct the problem. He created the problem. He's the criminal! You don't take your case to the criminal, you take your criminal to court.

Mine was the same psychology that makes Negroes even today, though it bothers them down inside, keep letting the white man tell them how much "progress" they are making. They've heard it so much they've almost gotten brainwashed into believing it—or at least accepting it.

No sane black man really believes that the white man ever will give the black man anything more than token integration.

How can the white American government figure on selling "democracy" and "brotherhood" to non-white peoples—if they read and hear every day what's going on right here in America, and see the better-than-a-thousand-words photographs of the American white man denying "democracy" and "brotherhood" even to America's native-born non-whites?

He saw in this the road to a new sense of group identity, a self-conscious role in history, and above all a sense of man's own worth which he claimed the white man had destroyed in the Negro.

His views about the white man were devastating, but at no time did he transgress against my own personality and make me feel that I, as an individual, shared in the guilt. He attributed the degradation of the Negro people to the white man. He denounced integration as a fraud. He contended that if the leaders of the established civil rights organizations persisted, the social struggle would end in bloodshed because he was certain the white man would never concede full integration.

For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the _raped_, or the wolf asking the _sheep_, 'Do you hate me?' The white man is in no moral _position_ to accuse anyone else of hate!

Elijah Muhammad spoke of how the black man was Original Man, who had been kidnapped from his homeland and stripped of his language, his culture, his family structure, his family name, until the black man in America did not even realize who he was.

This is what police always do in cases of police brutality. They brutalize the black man and then turn around and charge the black man with attacking them.

You don't have to go behind bars to be in jail in this country. If you are born in this country with black skin you are already in jail, you are already confined, you are already watched over by a warden who poses as your mayor and poses as your governor and poses as your President.

The white man's system has been imposed upon non-white peoples all over the world.

Speaking like this doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression.