Quotes About Oppression

She was trapped same as me, but she was trapped by her mind, by the minds of the people round her, not by the law. At the African church, Mr Vesey used to say, 'Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind.' I tried to tell her that. I said, 'My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.

If everyone was so keen to Christianize the slaves, why weren't they taught to read the Bible for themselves?

It washed over me for the first time in my life how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of it.

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible?

Martha Whites were a form of punishment only T. Ray could have dreamed up. I shut my mouth instantly.

I laid my palm on the second square – the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.

Perhaps the thing most denied to women is anger. "Forbidden anger, women could find no voice in which publicly to complain; they took refuge in depression," writes Carolyn Heilbrun.56 Her words came true for me. Without the ability to allow or the means to adequately express the anger, I began to slide into periods of depression.

an unbearable heaviness came over me.

Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.

This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.

I was shrewd like mauma. Even at ten I knew this story about people flying was pure malarkey. We weren't some special people who lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn't any magic to it.

Missus called out to Tomfry, said keep it down, a lady shouldn't know where her bacon comes from. When we heard that, I told Aunt-Sister, missus didn't know what end her bacon went in and what end it came out. Aunt-Sister slapped me into yesterday.

time to assert one's right is when it's denied!" "I'm sorry

I ain't sorry for stealing it, just for getting caught." "How come you took it?" "Cause," she said. "Cause I could." Those words stuck with me. Mauma didn't want that cloth, she just wanted to make some trouble. She couldn't get free and she couldn't pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.

There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control. Yes, it's unfair to deprive them, but there's a greater good here that must be protected.

She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow's cap with strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak and tiny fur-lined shoes. She was known to line girls up on the Idle Bench for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised her, and her "polite education for the female mind," which was composed

Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it's brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all.

I knew a free black there who had a room, and he took her in. She said when the Guard stopped searching for her, she'd go back to the Grimkés and throw herself on their mercy." He'd been pacing, but now he sat down next to me and finished up the truth quick as he could. "One night she went out to the privy in Radcliff Alley and there was a white man there, a slave poacher named Robert Martin. He was waiting for her.

Once again we were in captivity.

Do what you have to do, censure us, withdraw your support, we'll press on anyway. Now, sirs, kindly take your feet off our necks.

I was crying for the vast imbalance, the heart that had been lost, the rejection of the earth and body, the oppression and diminishment of things considered feminine. It was a suffering with, a despair I felt on behalf of something much larger than myself.

I was shrewd like mauma. Even at ten I knew this story about people flying was pure malarkey. We weren't some special people who lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn't any magic to it.

Already that morning missus had taken her cane stick to me once cross my backside for falling asleep during her devotions. Every day, all us slaves, everyone but Rosetta, who was old and demented, jammed in the dining room before breakfast to fight off sleep while missus taught us short Bible verses like "Jesus wept" and prayed out loud about God's favorite subject, obedience. If you nodded off, you got whacked right in the middle of God said this and God said that.

these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course, benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of muzzle.