Quotes About Oppression

White supremacy is not just a social arrangement: it is a race-based faith.

White supremacy is a very, very popular and trenchant belief in this country's history and heritage.

America was not built on kindness or the Christianity of Christ. It was not built on freedom or liberty. This nation was built on white supremacy.

We live in a country whose government and many of its people support white supremacy and disintegration of basic human rights.

When I'm around people having conversations about their day, I'm looking at them, like, 'What could they possibly be talking about? How are we not talking about deconstructing white supremacy right now? How are we not trying to save trans people?'

There is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom, and China will, in the end, become a nation ruled by law, where human rights reign supreme.

I'm not sure that there are days of my life when I'm not confronted with racism. For some, that may seem hyperbolic, but it's true.

The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

The really nice thing with 'Future Past' is that you actually have a superhero film - much to everyone's surprise, I will hope - that is about something. It's about racism, I hope. It's about resisting oppression. It's about fighting for freedom and the cost of fighting for freedom.

Nothing surprises me as far as racism is concerned in this country.

We are so beaten down by political correctness that most of us are numb to the surrender of America.

Women's liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.

But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.

All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren't killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.

You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren't killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence

To which I'd like to append a variation on Lewis's Law ("all comments on feminism justify feminism"): the plethora of men attacking women and anyone who stands up for women in order to prove that women are not under attack and feminism has no basis in reality are apparently unaware that they're handily proving the opposite. 

Men's bodies are weapons and women's bodies are targets and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.

Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality.

How do you make art when the art that's all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes?

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter," says an African proverb. But what if the lionesses write eloquently but the editors prefer the hunters' version?