Quotes About Oppression

Sexist discrimination has prevented white women from assuming the dominant role in the perpetuation of white racial imperialism , but it has not prevented white from absorbing, supporting, and advocating racist ideology or acting individually as racist oppressors in various spheres of American life.

As many black women and other women of color saw white women from privileged classes benefiting economically more than any other group from reformist feminist gains in the workforce, it simply reaffirmed that feminism was a white woman thing.

Every women's movement in America, from its earliest origin to the present day, has been built on a racist foundation, a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political ideology. The racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and early 20th century American life was mirrored in the women's rights movement. The first white women's rights advocates were never seeking social equality for all women. They were seeking social equality for white women.

Women need to know that they can reject the powerful's definition of their reality… Many poor and exploited women, especially non-white women, would have been unable to develop positive self-concepts if they had not exercised their power to reject the powerful's definition of their reality.

White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action.

As long as men dominate women, we cannot have love between us. That love and domination can coexist is one of the most powerful lies patriarchy tells us all.

In a racially imperialist nation such as ours, it is the dominant race that reserves for itself the luxury of dismissing racial identity while the oppressed race is made daily aware of their racial identity. It is the dominant race that can make it seem that their experience is representative.

Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known.

no puede existir un feminismo del poder si la imagen del poder que se evoca es el que se obtiene mediante la explotación y opresión de otras personas

There are a few if any public spaces where black folks can express fear of whiteness, be it engendered by rational or irrational states of mind. However, white fear of blackness gains a constant hearing.

These children, like their adult peers, do not link their longing for wealth with uncritical acceptance and support of transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They simply believe they are longing for the "good life" and that this life has to be bought.

The neat binary categories of white and black or male and female are not there when it comes to class. How will they identify the enemy. How will they know who to fear or who the challenge.

men suffer by the patriarchal insistence that they enact rituals of alienation that lead to "estrangement from women." She states

Black and white women have for so long allowed their idea of liberation to be formed by the existing status quo that they have not yet devised a strategy by which we can come together. They have had only a slave's idea of freedom. And to the slave, the master's way of life represents the ideal free lifestyle.

As long as sexist thinking socializes boys to be "killers," whether in imaginary good guy, bad guy fights or as soldiers in imperialism to maintain coercive power over nations, patriarchal violence against women and children will continue.

We cannot have a wolrd of great environmentalism while we maintain the violence of whtie supremacy and racism.

positive recognition and acceptance of difference is a necessary starting point as we work to eradicate white supremacy.

Totalitarianism always starts with restrictions on the rights of others. We must avoid this at all costs. George Washington even said, "If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

nation also felt they were victims of injustice, but they

Two hundred years ago when slavery was going on it was illegal to educate a slave, particularly to teach them to read. Why do you think that was? Because when you educate a man, you liberate a man.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

Scarcely a year after Hitler had been handed power, something of what he had always claimed about the Jews had actually come to pass. He said they were different. And they had become different. He had accused them of being furtive and sneaky. And they had become furtive and sneaky. Covering up. Lying low. Watching the door. Hiding away. Survival rats. Constantly nervous, trying to blend in, avoiding people's

Such a lot to have thrown away to please an unbalanced ruler and a few vicious old generals.

I had rather starve to death here, being a free man, than to have plenty in slavery. I cannot be a slave any more,--nobody could hold me as a slave now, except in irons. Old as I am, I would rather face the Russian fire, or die at the point of the sword, than go into slavery. [Philip Younger, 72 years old]