Quotes About Oppression

Corset,' Mrs. Erskine? I don't understand." Because she was trussed up in one herself, she couldn't comprehend how Ariah had escaped hers.

Déjenme aunque sea el derecho de pataleo que tienen los ahorcados!

Y por si fuera poco el estar trabado de flaco, vivía si es que todavía vive, aplastado por el odio como una piedra; y es válido decirlo, su desventura fue la de haber nacido.

Habíamos dejado el aire caliente allá arriba y nos íbamos hundiendo en el puro calor sin aire.

Only those of us who have been slaves can really taste freedom, he sometimes thought.

I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.

Irigaray remarks in such a vein that the masquerade... is what women do... in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up their own.

Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of "slave morality.

It would surely be a mistake to gauge the success of feminism by its success as a colonial project. p41.

As feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy.

L'incapacité à reconnaître les processus culturels spécifiques de l'oppression de genre elle-même n'est-elle pas une forme d'impérialisme épistémologique?

El "sexo", la categoría, obliga al "sexo", la configuración social de los cuerpos, a través de lo que Wittig denomina un contrato forzoso. Así pues, la categoría de "sexo" es un nombre que esclaviza. El lenguaje "arroja manojos de realidad sobre el cuerpo social", pero estos manojos no se desechan con facilidad y añade: al formarlo y configurarlo de forma violenta.

West harkens back to the halcyon days when there was "a vital community bound by its ethical ideals."56 Unfortunately, oppression does not always produce such felicitous outcomes, and the victims of oppression are not always ennobled by their experience and an inspiration to the rest of us.

Friedman described the situation in 1963 in these epigrammatic terms: "to the Negro demand for 'now,' to which the Deep South has replied 'never,' many liberal whites are increasingly responding 'later.

Counterracism was never an option.

Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.

Their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

Pharaoh is clearly a metaphor. He embodies and represents raw, absolute, worldly power. He is, like Pilate after him, a stand-in for the whole of the empire. As the agent of the "empire of force," he reappears in many different personae.9

The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. "Pharaoh" reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force.

Silence and tacit consensus always, without fail, protect privilege. That is why the privileged are characteristically silencers.

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

Save us, Lord, from a religion that ignores the cries of the exploited and oppressed. Lead us into a deeper faith that challenges injustice and makes the sacrifices that must be made to build a society that is ever more truly human. Amen.