Best Systemic Oppression Quotes

"The act of assigning culpability for systemic oppression to individual actors is highly counterproductive."

"Once you have a systemic and institutional framework, you see how oppression manifests in many subtle ways."

"After the collapse of slavery, a new system was born called convict leasing, which was a new form of slavery, then a new system was born, a Jim Crow system that relegated African American to a permanent second-class status, and now we have a new system of mass incarceration, which strips millions of poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color, of the very rights supposedly won by the civil rights movement."

"The conversation about reparations is not just about slavery; it's about systemic oppression, redlining, and more."

"They want to instill fear in people who might resist. That is not a bug of this system; it's a feature."

"Slavery in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries cannot be separated from segregation in the late 19th and 20th centuries, which cannot be separated from redlining and other things today. It's all connected."

"You can rip down all of the systems and maintain the norm. You can change the definition of racism from actual racism to the systems of oppression... and expect that the building is going to stand on air. That's not the way any of this works."

"It's important to stand up against systemic oppression in communities of color."

"Whiteness is not skin color, whiteness is a system of oppression."

"As long as society insists upon viewing things only through the lens of individual people who are at fault, oppression will never be sufficiently addressed."

"The major systems of oppression are interlocking."

"Freedom is our element, it is as water is to a fish, and we cannot be free when we are surrounded on all sides by systems of control and condemnation."

"I don't believe in my heart of hearts that there is not systematic oppression in this country."

"I just want to always encourage us to name the harm. Name the systems of oppression."

"Critical race theory is the study of systemic oppression."

"The whole system is designed to keep you down. Yeah, the whole system is a lie."

"Systems of oppression have been entrenched in U.S. institutions since time immemorial."

"She's a strong woman, but her voice cracked under the weight of the systemic oppression."

"It was actually a quite evil but very clever way to justify the structural forms of Oppression that black people were subjected to."

"There is a lot of rage that is being felt from 400 plus years of systemic oppression, a systemic racism that of a country that was built off of genocide and slavery."

"We can't exist that way because the system is set up for our people to be oppressed."

"We're still enslaved today due to the fact that all of our life-sustaining institutions are controlled and defined by Europeans."

"We're not trying to strengthen the system that's been oppressing us."

"It's not just about feelings, it's about calling out oppressive power structures."

"Affirmative action acknowledges the systemic oppression of people of color."

"This is about systemic oppression, historic and current systemic oppression."

"Oppression doesn't exist because some people are rude, so making them act more polite will only get us a fraction of the way there."

"The white man has a God complex, killing us in the streets, oppressing us. He thinks he can take our life when he wants."

"The key to that system remaining over all of these folk is that they want you to stick up under that flag."

"If the whole governmental system and your non-violent thoughts are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity only serves to place you on the side of the oppressors."

"Women from displaced groups facing violence by a bigger system."

"Everybody ain't cut out to work for their oppressor."

"This system is uniquely designed to grind black people up into a dust into a pulp."

"The whole system is designed to keep people oppressed."

"The conversation around this topic has enabled incredibly interesting discussions around depictions of racism and systemic oppression within TV shows."

"It's about all these intersecting corrupt and oppressive power structures that make existence more difficult for some women than others."

"Mass incarceration, privatized prisons, police militarization, and brutality—all calloused hands of oppression."

"Understanding historical context reveals the systemic oppression still present today."

"It's sad... media and social media platforms and police and criminalization all work hand in hand to continue to oppressed folks of color."

"We were not here first, but we built the country and were intentionally oppressed."

"Identity politics means that people have different relationships to systemic oppression based upon who they are, and that we have to take that into account when we are trying to figure out which way forward."

"The system is built to silence you, to keep you afraid of not conforming."

"We are existing under the crushing weight of a monster the likes of which the world has never seen."

"The show does an excellent job visualizing how she's suffocated by a system that's ruled by the Iron Fist of a power hungry despot."

"We black people didn't create this system; we were just subject to it and abused by the system."

"White privilege is based on white power and in order to guarantee privileges for white people, you have to systematically disadvantage black people."

"The overarching intersectional view of the world is that the white one percent control institutions and governments in order to uphold a global system of capitalist patriarchal white supremacy."