Quotes About Oppression

A pesar de las diferencias reales que existen entre ellos, los trabajadores de una fábrica se parecen a las secretarias de una oficina, a los campesinos de una finca, a los esclavos de una plantación —incluso a las mujeres en un matrimonio— en que todos ellos viven y trabajan en condiciones de poder desigual.

Misssions and the California Mission system should not be regarded as a symbol of a golden era in California's history. Missions should be regarded for what they were, as death camps- where people were enslaved, tortured and murdered.

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.

Where they make a desert, they call it peace.

La guerrilla es de todos los tiempos y todas las latitudes y el ocupante no dejará de ser nunca el enemigo para toda alma bien nacida, lo mismo que ocupación significa siempre violencia.

But always they featured things we believed were wrong in the sight of God. Stealing, lying, murder. Was this what God wanted in times like these? How should a Christian act when evil was in power?

How should a Christian act when evil was in power?

We were shoved against the back wall. Thirty or forty people were all that could fit in. And still the soldiers drove women over the side, cursing, jabbing with their guns. Shrieks rose from the center of the car but still the press increased. It was only when eighty women were packed inside that the door thumped shut and we heard iron bolts driven into place.

Kapteyn appeared with Betsie in the dining room door. Her lips were swollen and puffy, a bruise was darkening on her cheek. She half fell into the chair next to mine. "Oh Betsie! He hurt you!" "Yes." She dabbed at the blood on her mouth. "I feel so sorry for him." Kapteyn whirled, his white face even paler. "Prisoners will remain silent!" he shrieked.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Golden bars make no less a prison than a coffin on a hill. And in caged reformation, one wanders aimless still. The rafters now a recollection of sacred suppression. How the morning dawn strikes mourning confession. Now Death yields a harvest of the living masses. We walk toward its path no earthly power surpasses.

Pause for a moment and prayerfully consider your response: What breaks your heart?

Joining the ranks of some notables who had penned powerful stuff behind bars. Saint Paul, the apostle. John Bunyan. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Martin Luther King Jr. But,

In the United States, people don't revolt in order to obtain freedom, but continue denying it to others.

Sometimes a people lose their right to remain silent when pressured to remain silent.

I imagine these men sitting in fashion control centers around the world thinking of new ways to torture women, new ways to make them wince twenty years from now when they look at old photographs of themselves.

What kind of place required a man to work all day without being allowed to eat or drink? There had to be rules, didn't there? This was America, after all.

The important question to ask is why these bodies are allowed to exist. If a country such as Spain allowed a repressive body like the Inquisition to exist for four hundred years, it is not because the Inquisition forced itself on the Spanish nation. It is because the Spaniards allowed it to exist.

Hope for a future … free from oppression and injustice, when a new humanity includes all peoples, languages, tribes, and nations—now exists in the realm of mystery. Only the mystics see and experience it in its fullness.

Unjust systems appear normal to those in power, and any change will produce feelings of loss. True reconciliation, through the cross of Jesus, will affect the lives of the privileged. The colonizer has to completely leave the confines of power and privilege and join with those who are colonized. Of the colonizer Memmi declared, "let him adopt the colonized people and be adopted by them; let him become a turncoat.

Reconciliation for the powerful and privileged means trusting those who have lived under oppression and even following their lead in becoming one new humanity.

The seduction of whiteness and privilege is powerful. Whites can always return to a life of privilege.

no choice was wrong except the one that was imposed on us.