Quotes About Oppression

Separation in culture and arts does nobody any favors except for the people in power. That's just it... So I feel like I'm in the business of challenging that narrative.

Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.

I began to feel whatever narrow space I had in Saudi Arabia was getting narrower. I thought it would be better to get out and be safe.

For centuries in this country, black people were seen as three-fifths of a person. So when you hear the national anthem or you see an American flag as an African American person who has experienced the effects of that dehumanizing existence, it's not going to mean the same.

The discrimination that women face cuts across nationality, caste or class and age. It doesn't matter where you live or how much money you have, women have always been dictated to about what they should wear and how they should behave.

I tell you, in this country, you don't get much of an education. Throughout high school, through junior college, which is all I went, I didn't know anything about the annihilation of all the Indian nations that were here.

The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them.

Native American activists have been present as long as the Europeans have been working to colonize us.

Our corporate hustlers are direct descendants of the whalers and sealers, of butchers such as George Armstrong Custer, of the gold speculators and railroad magnates who seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, and wiped out the buffalo herds, of the oil and mineral companies that went abroad to exploit—under the protection of the American military—the resources of others.

Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider.

Many of America's policing techniques, including widespread surveillance, were pioneered and perfected in American colonies such as the Philippines before being introduced to police departments in the United States. Blacks in the South had to be controlled. Labor unions and radical socialists had to be broken.

For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and that anything could be done to us,' Ray said. 'Then the word nigger became politically incorrect. Sio they began to calling us criminals. When you say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not matter. It means he or she is a nigger. It means they deserve what they get.' - Melvin Ray

The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.150

We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed

Every system of power in the world has a vested interest in weakening the individuality of its subjects and tries to weaken or it possible completely extinguish it.

If J. Edgar Hoover had something like Total Information Awareness, would his agents have used it, as they did all the other means available to them, to harass civil rights activists, reds, poor people's organizations, unionists, & peaceniks? Most certainly!

Let's face it: America is full of borderline, petty despots. They gravitate toward work as police officers, security gaurds, & supervisory bureaucrats like firemen, welfare case workers, and school principles.

tyranny cannot stand forever. It is an ugly beast that must feed. Eventually, the Empire will devour everything it has, and will turn on its own.

History taught that those who had power were generally loath to relinquish any of it unless they were forced to do so.

He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I'd like to scream at him. It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.

How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?

I detested that people who already had everything they could possibly want would step on others who had nothing. Would use them and crush them. I'd lived my life mainly in the streets and found out the hard way that people who could have helped just hurt us.

She didn't want any contact with Whitney at all. He was the boogeyman. He'd held absolute authority over her for her entire life. Defying him was difficult. It said a lot that Shylah was willing to die-that she would choose a horrific death rather than go back to him.

The cell wanted to overthrow the government and to do that, they were hurting their own people. Draden had never seen the logic in that, how could they convince themselves that what they were doing was justified because they believed in the endgame.