Quotes About Oppression

This was a pure case of governing by intimidation, which is the essence of authoritarianism.

Mark's story of Jesus' last days . . . is an intensely political drama, filled with conspiratorial backroom deals and covert action, judicial manipulation and prisoner exchange, torture and summary execution . . . And we do well not to forget that this very narrative of arrest, trial and torture is still lived out by countless political prisoners around the world today. Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man

Often overlooked are the ways prison culture systematically maintains and nurtures rape culture, targeting women and men made to be women. Again, members of LGBT and trans communities suffer especially egregiously in prison,[111] since they directly challenge the heteronormativity maintained by hegemonic masculinism.

We are trapped in the jaws of something shaking the life out of us." With these words from his historical novel, Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman conveys a sense of what it means to be caught out on stage, vulnerable at the point of having one's life taken, shaken out, by what I have term "the theatrics of state terror." Wideman's

Shock and awe" is deployed in U.S. city streets, complete with police in full body armor, helmeted and masked, with rubber-bullets (as well as live ammunition), flash bang grenades, armored personnel carriers, drones and more. Studying over 800 SWAT team actions between 2010 and 2013, the ACLU report, The War Comes Home, details the extraordinary intensification of militarized police.

Throughout U.S. history—whether it was a matter of controlling indigenous peoples across Western lands that white settlers wanted to occupy, black populations deemed unruly, or laborers not complying with the economic usurpation of a white overclass—the weaponry of military and local policing have often comingled.

Michel Foucault reminds us that in societies that organize massively to incarcerate its citizens "there is no outside" for anyone.

The mind-numbing, soul-killing savage sameness that makes each day an echo of the day before, with neither thought nor hope of growth, makes prison the abode of Spirit death that it is for over a million men and women now held in U.S. hell holes.

Today, the links between young black, brown, or poor people and mass incarceration are all the more startling and fearsome. We now have the documented reality of the "school-to-prison pipeline" that often gives up on excellence of education and a professional future for America's racialized poor, and then "tracks" them into jobs and communities where vulnerability enhances the likelihood of warehousing in prison.

If you want to get your outcasts out of sight, first you need a ghetto and then you need a prison to take pressure off the ghetto. . . . Short-term terror and revulsion are more powerful than long-term wisdom or self-interest.

Their means may be strategically effective as in the work of the Black Panthers in Chicago, with Fred Hampton's efforts there before he was assassinated by police. Their means may be, in other contexts, less effective than were the Black Panthers and other groups. In either case, though, they are termed "social dynamite" because they are, or can be perceived as, a major threat to the functioning of the economic and political order.

Children walking out on strike from textile mills in New Jersey in the 1840s, shoemakers doing the same in New England, the Black Panthers and other dissidents of color challenging white supremacist exploitation in the 1960s and 1970s—for all their differences, these share in being viewed and treated as "social dynamite.

Such groups are often forced to live on the edge of social legality and, even when engaged in fully legal behavior, they are presented and hunted as criminals. Such has been the fate of groups like the Young Lords, and, again, the Black Panther Party, as well as "gangs" in the poor communities of Los Angeles and Chicago, for example, whose offenses were often mixed with programs aiming at social renewal and liberation.

As French novelist and essayist Jean Genet once wrote about prison, "it is in this place that racism reaches its cruelest pitch . . . in this place that racism becomes a kind of concentrate of racism.

I am claiming that the making of life for the oppressed is a love of the enemy in the sense that the enemy is challenged to come out of prevailing systems of death to embrace, support, and enter into what makes for life and justice for the oppressed and ultimately for all.

There is no life for the enemy apart from what makes life and justice for those they oppress. Love of the enemy animated by Thurman's "vital content" means putting an end to the system of death which enemies create, inhabit, and by which they maintain structures afflicting oppressed peoples.

Structural racism works—if I could summarize all too briefly—by stereotyping peoples and then routinizing socially experienced outcomes that are violent and destructive, often exposing members of racially-marked groups to slow or sudden death.

I include as "economically elite" not just the fraction of the one-percent who control the nation's financial portfolio, as it were, those who have the largest incomes and economic power. I include within the culture of the economic elite those other groups who live dependent upon, or in proximity to, this largely white overclass.

American slaves and their descendants have taken the texts of the bible in every sense of the word: embraced them, endured them, seized them, stolen them, caught them and captured them. Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book

The suffering of the conquered and colonized people appears as a necessary sacrifice and the inevitable process of modernization. This logic has been applied from the conquest of America until the Gulf War, and its victims are as diverse as indigenous Americans and Iraqi Civilians. Enriqué Dussel, The Invention of the Americas

Violated peoples do not forget. They dream alternatives and organize against overwhelming power. In the U.S., organized and creative resistance has an equally long history. In

Even the rising number of poor whites being swept into prison by corporate dispossession and profiteering today are often "blackened," in the sense of being marked in the eyes of the larger society as "transgressive" and in some of the ways often meted out to persons of color. In

The prisons of today preserve and display the way the black-white antithesis has been deployed in white supremacist logic and persists as a dominant structure. That is to say, in today's prisons an "anti-black white racism" constitutes a white supremacist order of power deployed against all non-white groups. In

We face today an especially sinister emergence, not just more police violence, mass incarceration, and a death penalty, but the rise of the U.S. "carceral" or "penal state." Here