Quotes About Oppression

Today I shall be a wicked murderous tyrant and crush something nice under my heel.

Mindannyian a hatalom szörny? hajtóm?vében élünk, amely csikorog, sípol és éget, és így senki sem mondja: a térképre rajzolt vonalak butaságok.

The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.

Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst

The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing opening scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: if you discriminate against us, we'll make more money than you and buy your fancy hotel that wouldn't let us in. Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?

Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they're mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I'm interrupted.

Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 have shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States.

I want to destroy the universal. I want to rip it down. It is not whiteness but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority. By we I mean nonwhites,

But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.

Humor was a form of survival, since it created a necessary psychic distinction from slavery.

But where does the silence that neglects her end, and where does the silence that respects her begin?

The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: "If you discriminate against us, we'll make more money than you, and buy your fancy hotel that wouldn't let us in." Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?

One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children.

If the work of art circulates, it circulates for profit, which has been grossly reaped by white authorship. Speaking on this subject, Amiri Baraka offers an invaluable quote: "All cultures learn from each other. The problem is that if the Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie, I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi.

Three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track built to make Manifest Destiny a reality, but when the celebratory photo of the Golden Spike was taken, not a single Chinese man was welcome to pose with the other—white—railway workers.

themselves. During this period the model minority myth was popularized to keep Communists—and black people—in check. Asian American success was circulated to promote capitalism and to undermine the credibility of black civil rights: we were the "good" ones since we were undemanding, diligent, and never asked for handouts from the government. There's no discrimination, they assured us, as long as you're compliant and hardworking

where Chinese immigrants couldn't even leave their homes without being spat at, clubbed, or shot in the back, a campaign culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law that banned a race from entering the United States, after legislators and media characterized the Chinese as "rats," "lepers," but also "machine-like" workers who stole jobs from good white Americans.

But assimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible.

In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we're being used by whites to keep the black man down.

Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.

My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don't talk to me about gratitude.

I've been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please has become ingrained into my consciousness. Even to declare that I'm writing for myself would still mean I'm writing to a part of me that wants to please white people. I didn't know how to escape it.

Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn't instantly fix a national economy, but it could order women into the veil. If