Quotes About Oppression

because white men can't police their imagination black people are dying

Patricia Williams has pointed out in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: "The cold game of equality staring makes me feel like a thin sheet of glass…. I could force my presence, the real me contained in those eyes, upon them, but I would be smashed in the process." Interviewed

essential desire for equity and the ability to live freely without the fear of white terrorism literally trumps everything, as former first lady Michelle Obama expresses in Becoming.

Charlotte: Racism exists outside of reason. Black people have never been human. Charles: That is so hopeless. Charlotte: Go further into that hopelessness, and then we can really begin to see each other.

Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term--John Henryism--for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

Just us, just people, the same people, but what is it that the just people are feeling or wanting or being? The brouhaha so brutal, rising, rising up, rise up. What rises up within, between us? What comes up because we are the history within us?

Native peoples imbibed all of the vices of U.S. citizens, they claimed, while slaves absorbed their virtues.

I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice;

Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Renaissance.

The heat compounded, and ugliness settled its cloud over us, profound as human speech, although by then we were not speaking.

Not all the young women recruited to holy war had their feet caned by the moral police. There were those who held the canes.

It is stereotypically English to accept that we are born with a fixed 'station' in life. It's what keeps the poor downtrodden.

In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.

When power is up for grabs," Pitt said, "the first casualty is often liberty.

The CCP seemed to be following a dictum attributed to Stalin: 'Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. —ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) was the man who defined the Communist world as the first society in history condemned to live behind walls in order to stop people getting out.

when virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence.

There is no crueller tyranny," said Montesquieu, "than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.

Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution will always be attractive to the kind of romantic who believes that he is being oppressed by global capitalism when he maxes out his credit card.

Hitler wouldn't have needed to find someone else. Someone else would have found him. When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

But even though catastrophic oppression brought about a process of objectification and dehumanization, the absolute negation of humanity was not possible because a damaged human spirit seeks to resurrect and reconstruct itself; it also seeks self-consciousness.

The first duty of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful.