Quotes About Oppression

Lighting: a hundred Watts Detroit, Newark and New York Screeching nerves, exploding minds lives tied to a policeman's whistle a welfare worker's doorbell finger

Image letting some white woman rename you for her convenience.

Imagine letting some white woman rename you for her convenience.

Uncle Willie ordered us between licks to stop crying. I tried to, but Bailey refused to cooperate. Later he explained that when a person is beating you you should scream as loud as possible; maybe the whipper will become embarrassed or else some sympathetic soul might come to your rescue.

Although there is nothing amusing about racial discrimination, the oppressed find funny things to say about it. The white folks are so prejudiced in my town, a colored person is not allowed to eat vanilla ice cream.

Malcolm X was as good as his word. He said, "Black people are letting white Americans know that the time is coming for ballots or bullets. They know it is useless to ask their enemy for justice. And surely whites are the enemies of blacks, otherwise how did we get to this country in the first place?

They knew the burden of feminine sensibilities suffocated by masculine responsibilities.

But on that onerous day, oppressed beyond relief, my own mortality was borne in upon me on sluggish tides of doom.

We had cooked the food of a nation of racists, and despite the many opportunities, there were few stories of black servants poisoning white families. If that didn't show mercy, then I misunderstood the word.

Whites were safely isolated from our concerns. When they chose, they could lift the racial curtain that separated us. They could indulge in sexual escapades, increase our families with mulatto bastards, make fortunes out of our music and eunuchs out of our men, then in seconds they could step away, and return unscarred to their pristine security.

My sin lies in not screaming loud

He felt strangled by helplessness.

They could be making her sleep in a closet under the stairs!

God save us from people who think they know what's best for us.

What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger.

What he brought out was a wooden gag they put in someone's mouth before doing something drastic, like cutting off a leg.

Trapped him the gray people    as the great are brought down by the weak    when they are many As the hawk is mobbed by the roller birds    as the great sea eagle is brought down by gulls

I've never said it to his face, but sometimes he can be a little controlling. He tries to tell me what to wear, how to do my hair, that I'm too loud sometimes.

Maybe that was why it was almost always the underclasses, the women, the people of color, the gay people, the ones who were already stigmatized as being vulnerable, availble, trapped by the body, who took the risk of the wire.

like all of her, wrong sex, wrong class, wrong attitude...

She'd never thought of it as a colony. Instead it had been invaded, occupied, enslaved. She supposed colonized was more palatable to those who'd done it.

an emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual's prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules—rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems."2

Robert Subby wrote codependency is "an emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual's prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules—rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems.

In an article from the book Co-Dependency, An Emerging Issue, Robert Subby writes that codependency is "an emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual's prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules—rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems.