Quotes About Oppression

A feminism that is truly anti-racist and anti-imperialist must also be anticapitalist.

alliance of the patriarchy and capitalism that wants us to be obedient, submissive and quiet.

Those "others" are largely female. For in capitalist society, the organization of social reproduction rests on gender: it relies on gender roles and entrenches gender oppression.

It's terrible, … for us to have been so scared to be seen with books we have every right to read.

We know, for instance, that Americans have forcefully resisted extending the right to vote; those in power have disenfranchised blacks, women, and the poor in myriad ways. We know, too, that women historically have had fewer civil protections than corporations. Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high-sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game.

This is why Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees. He wanted them to break with the Crown, not to disturb the class order.

In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough.

The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves.

Her rapist went unpunished, and yet she was sterilized.70

Hierarchy was easily maintained when the majority felt there was someone below them. "How many," the author asked, "even of the better sort," would choose to be "Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and Tyrannical Rule over all below them?

As the "waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.

The first slave cargo arrived in Boston in 1638. Winthrop, for his part, owned Indian slaves; his son purchased an African.47

What can be more false and heartless," Adams logged in his diary, "than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?

early as 1775, landless tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia, voiced a complaint that was common across the sprawling colony: there was "no inducement for the poor man to Fight, for he had nothing to defend.

Slaves were a lure, dangled before poorer men in order to persuade them to put up their land as collateral.

the early generations of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the routine reliance on servants or slaves. Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.

Most of the founders of postmodernism were Europeans who had witnessed oppressive political systems up close—Nazism and Communism. Both these systems were organized around a single principle: race (Nazism) or economic class (Communism). Both embraced a grand vision of history moving inexorably toward some ideal society. And both ended up becoming totalitarian, using their utopian visions to justify secret police and death camps.

The loss of objectivity in moral thought does not lead to liberation. It leads to oppression.

Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny.

And if there is no objective or universal truth, then any claim to have objective truth will be treated as nothing but an attempt by one interpretive community to impose its own limited, subjective perspective on everyone else. An act of oppression. A power grab.

Secular ideologies preach liberty but practice tyranny.

Montserrat Fontes's disturbing novel of a family trying to survive the brutal Porfirio Díaz regime at the turn of the twentieth century, Dreams of the Centaur, is followed by First Confession.

At the foot of the cross, the poor, the slave, the oppressed, the young, and the weak are all equal to the rich and powerful. Christians are forbidden to show favoritism (James 2:1–9; 5:1–6).

this was an era when for a male or female slave to refuse porneia could mean capital punishment. Some of the early martyrs were slaves who proclaimed their freedom in Christ by refusing to sexually service their masters—and were executed for it.