Quotes About Oppression

You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered. The colonized, who have made up their mind to make such an agenda into a driving force, have been prepared for violence from time immemorial. As soon as they are born it is obvious to them that their cramped world, riddled with taboos, can only be challenged by out and out violence.

National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event.

De la partie la plus noire de mon âme, à travers la zone hachurée me monte ce désir d'être tout à coup blanc. Je ne veux pas être reconnu comme Noir, mais comme Blanc. Or [...] qui peut la faire, sinon la Blanche? En m'aimant, elle me prouve que je suis digne d'un amour blanc.

The native is always on the alert, for since he can only make out with difficulty the many symbols of the colonial world, he is never sure whether or not he has crossed the frontier. Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty.

The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native that there he alone is the master.

The colonized intellectual has invested his aggression in his barely veiled wish to be assimilated to the colonizer's world. He has placed his aggression at the service of his own interests, his interests as an individual.

Deep down in the European unconscious has been hollowed out an excessively black pit where the most immoral instincts and unmentionable desires slumber. And since every man aspires to whiteness and light, the European has attempted to repudiate this primitive personality, which does its best to defens itself. When European civilisation came into contact with the black world, with these savages, everyone was in agreement that these block people were the essence of evil.

Resorting to technical language means you are determined to treat the masses as uninitiated. Such language is a poor front for the lecturer's intent to deceive the people and leave them on the sidelines. Language's endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand.

Nor will we acquiesce in the help for underdeveloped countries being a program of "sisters of charity." This help should be the ratification of a double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that it is their due , and the realization by the capitalist powers that in fact they must pay .

Our victims know us by their wounds and shackles: that is what makes their testimony irrefutable. They only need to know what we have done to them for us to realize what we have done to ourselves. Is this necessary? Yes, because Europe is doomed.

you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades — especially to those who remain a little too Westernized — the solidarity of the metropolitans with their colonial agents. Have the courage to read it, primarily because it will make you feel ashamed

When the militants asked that the wind of history be given a little more in-depth analysis, the leaders retorted with the notion of hope, and the necessity and inevitability of decolonization, etc.

Qu'est-ce donc en réalité que cette violence ? Nous l'avons vu, c'est l'intuition qu'ont les masses colonisées que leur libération doit se faire, et ne peut se faire que par la force.

Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him

The young bourgeoisie, which seems stricken by premature senility, ignores the advice proffered and proves incapable of understanding that it is in its own interest to veil, even slightly, its exploitation of the people.

The argument chosen by the colonized was conveyed to them by the colonist, and by an ironic twist of fate it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force.

The argument chosen by the colonized was conveyed to them by the colonist, and by an ironic twist of fate it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force. The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it ever endeavor to cover up this nature of things.

The colonized, underdeveloped man is a political creature in the most global sense of the term. Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth

Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred—or everyone will be saved.

On the contrary we must persuade ourselves that colonialism is incapable of procuring for colonized peoples the material conditions likely to make them forget their quest for dignity. Once colonialism has understood where its social reform tactics would lead it, back come the old reflexes of adding police reinforcements, dispatching troops, and establishing a regime of terror better suited to its interests and its psychology. (147)

At the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was not seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a sweet, kind-hearted mother who protects her child form a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free reign to its malevolent instincts. The colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune. (149)

We have become so used to the occupier's contempt and his determination to maintain his stranglehold, whatever the cost, that any semblance of generosity or any sign of goodwill is greeted with surprise and jubilation.

Whatever gains the colonized make through armed or political struggle, they are not the result of the colonizer's good will or goodness of heart but to the fact that he can no longer postpone such concessions. Moreover, the colonized subject must be aware that it is not colonialism which makes the concessions but him.

The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a black or Arab face.