Quotes About Oppression

No book can convey the depths of the black experience without including material from the oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my original sample let African Americans speak for themselves.

The first requirement of a slave society is secure borders. We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that. Indeed, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it easy for whites to kidnap and sell free blacks into slavery, thousands of free African Americans realized they could not be safe even in Northern states and fled to Canada, Mexico, and Haiti.

White mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books.

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

He ended his description of them with these menacing words: "I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.

African Americans helped build Hoover Dam but had to commute from Las Vegas to do it, while white workers and their families lived in Boulder City, a sundown town built just for them. African Americans helped build Kentucky Dam, but after they finished, their housing—"Negro Village"—was razed, they were booted out, and Marshall County, Kentucky, resumed being a sundown county.

Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.

Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, "School is in business to produce reliable people."17 Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: "It would be extremely naïve to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically."18 Henry Giroux, Freire's leading disciple

We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that.

For our first seventy years as a nation, then, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination

The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class. —KWAME NKRUMAH

Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge

We find that a high plane of sustained horror is often convenient for reasons of state. — Inspector Kraus (Gestapo)

In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.

she was oppressed, she was overcome by her own felicity; and happily disposed as is the human mind to be easily familiarized with any change for the better, it required several hours to give sedateness to her spirits, or any degree of tranquillity to her heart.

From politics, it was an easy step to silence

This violent oppression of spirits continued the whole evening. She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself.

Canciones y proverbios, todo habla de la fragilidad femenina. Pero quizá diga usted que todos han sido escritos por hombres. - Quizá lo diga... Pero, por favor, no ponga ningún ejemplo de libros. Los hombres han tenido todas la ventaja sobre nosotras al contar ellos la historia. La educación de ellos ha sido mucho más completa; la pluma ha estado en sus manos. No permitiré que los libros me prueben nada. (p. 259)

However, in order to be economically successful, the colonial invaders needed plentiful supplies of cheap labor—and it was this that led to the transatlantic slave trade.

that she suddenly understood how a sense of compassion for the victims of oppression can lead to a hatred of the oppressor—and there you have a recipe for reciprocal violence and internecine war like in Rwanda and Burundi.

Are you saying we have to find a way of forgiving the oppressor?" I asked, somewhat suspect of this ability to forgive or have compassion for the oppressor.

Later Rick was interviewed. 'You must have known it was dangerous—why did you do it?' he was asked. 'Well, you see, I happened to look into his eyes, and it was like looking into the eyes of a man,' he said. 'And the message was, "Won't anybody help me?" That same look in the eyes of the vulnerable and oppressed people that has appealed to human altruism led to so many heroic acts.

How addressing human injustices like poverty and gender oppression makes us better able to create hope for people and the environment. Our