Quotes About Oppression

I know that an overwhelming majority of the Belgian people are against the oppression of Africans. They disapprove of a colonial status for the Congo under which 14 million Congolese are exposed to the diktat of a tiny economic oligarchy. If the Belgian people were to have their say, the Congo would never have experienced the misfortunes which are affecting it now.

We prefer freedom with poverty to wealth with tyranny.

Chills went down my spine. I had a degree in history. When the government moves against a segment of its own population, it is bad. Nazi bad. Genocide bad.

The hardest memory of slavery that Rialla had to bear was not the lack of freedom; it was the lack of desiring freedom.

It's easier to be horrible if you can squash everyone who tries to stop you.

I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power.

Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice. In contrast, the matrix of domination refers to how these intersecting oppressions are actually organized. Regardless of the particular intersections involved, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression.

Self-definitions of Black womanhood were designed to resist the negative controlling images of Black womanhood advanced by Whites as well as the discriminatory social practices that these controlling images supported.

Despite differences of age, sexual orientation, social class, region, and religion, U.S. Black women encounter societal practices that restrict us to inferior housing, neighborhoods, schools, jobs, and public treatment and hide this differential consideration behind an array of common beliefs about Black women's intelligence, work habits, and sexuality. These common challenges in turn result in recurring patterns of experiences for individual group members.

Oppression describes any unjust situation where, systematically and over a long period of time, one group denies another group access to the resources of society.

Suppressing the knowledge produced by any oppressed group makes it easier for dominant groups to rule because the seeming absence of dissent suggests that subordinate groups willingly collaborate in their own victimization.

One key reason that standpoints of oppressed groups are suppressed is that self-defined standpoints can stimulate resistance.

An oppressed group's experiences may put its members in a position to see things differently, but their lack of control over the ideological apparatuses of society makes expressing a self-defined standpoint more difficult.

Social theories expressed by women emerging from these diverse groups typically do not arise from the rarefied atmosphere of their imaginations. Instead, social theories reflect women's efforts to come to terms with lived experiences within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and religion.

Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential for the survival of the subordinate.

Suppressing the knowledge produced by any oppressed group makes it easier for dominant groups to rule because the seeming absence of dissent suggests that subordinate groups willingly collaborate in their own victimization. Maintaining the invisibility of Black women and our ideas not only in the United States, but in Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and other places where Black women now live, has been critical in maintaining social inequalities.

if she'd had a tough time trying to live life as the Colored Professor. Annalee knew that in this uniform, she would simply disappear. her identity would blur and fade, then - poof- disintegrate. No wonder Benita acted so angry. In these clothes, people don't even see her.

The English had an army, and souls of vinegar, and they had killed and killed, and we were still not free.

A whole people's tumble into raw, untested century began with one man, penning his serpentine sojourn up from slavery-- I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but ... I must have been born somewhere and at some time. He began as another baby shoved directly into the wrong air.

Women, it is said, are inferior, amoral, animal and satanic. In which case, being born is either insulting, or meaningless.

Not surprisingly, nondemocratic regimes by their nature are built around the restriction of individual freedom.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it! Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! (American Revolutionary War)

It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.