Institutional Oppression Quotes

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”
― Audre Lorde

“Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.”
― Stokely Carmichael, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation

“Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people. I beg you to recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours, but springing from a soil plowed and sown by our own hands. I ask you to recognize laws and processes flowing from such a condition, understand them, seek to change them. If we do none of these, then we should not pretend horror or surprise when thwarted life expresses itself in fear and hate and crime.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.”
― Chuck D, Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, Vol. 1

“Same-sex marriage has not created problems for religious institutions; religious institutions have created problems for same-sex marriage.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear, The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body, But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with a club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“He could not blame the Army, Angelo could blame the Army; Angelo hated the Army. But he didnt hate the Army, not even now. He remembered what Maureen had told him once that it was the system that was at fault. But he could not even blame the system, because the system was not anything, it was only a kind of accumulation of everybody, and you could not blame everybody, not unless you wanted the blame to become diluted into a meaningless term, a just nothing. Besides, this system here in this country was the best system the world had ever produced, wasnt it? This system was by far and above the best system anywhere else in the world today. He felt if he did not find somebody to blame pretty soon he would hate everybody.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“Within the mental-health system in North America, the borderline victim of severe childhood trauma is usually blamed for her behaviour, which is regarded as having no legitimate basis and being self-indulgent; her trauma history is ignored and not talked about; and she is given as little treatment and follow-up as possible. At St Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, many staff members expressed the opinion, in my presence, that borderlines and multiple personality disorder patients did not have a legitimate right to in-patient treatment, and the out-patient department would not accept patients with either diagnosis. (1995)”
― Colin A. Ross, Satanic Ritual Abuse: Principles of Treatment

“Individuals are prey to institutions in modern mass societies... Individuals can struggle mightily against institutionalized conditions, but without changing the institutions themselves, those efforts will be largely for naught, since people
tire, lose focus, forget, and, eventually, give up their ghosts, while institutions share no such limitations.”
― Brian Awehali

“Bigotry lives not just in our words, but in our actions, thoughts, and institutions.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Racist legacy laws and modern racist practices are all part of the same system, and it needs to be changed now.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Institutional nepotism might be tolerated in prosperous times. Setbacks can become crises, however, when there is incompetence in key positions at crucial moments.”
― Stewart Stafford

“An institution rooted in slavery can never set us free.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Un conto ancora aperto

“Kindness is not just the absence of being mean or hateful. Being kind entails actively resisting actions, ideas, and institutions that rob others of dignity.”
― Bruce Reyes-Chow, In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World

“The sword does not feel the pain that it inflicts. Do not ask it about suffering.”
― Philip Hallie, From Cruelty to Goodness

“Perhaps this is why an institution is unlikely to feel or admit to shame; it may be unable to countenance the possibility that at root it is not what it purports, even to itself, to be. (quoted by Michael Barnett in Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda)”
― Elizabeth Spellman

“Institutionalized education is the door and money is the key.”
― Goitsemang Mvula

“A lack of concern about the plight of a “breeding” sow on a factory farm is also a result of normative systematic oppression – speciesism.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“Failing to notice a lack of Latino and African-American representation in congress is a result of systemic oppression – racism. General indifference to the fact that white men dominate large corporations is part of the invisibility of both racism and sexism. A lack of concern about the plight of a “breeding” sow on a factory farm is also a result of normative systematic oppression – speciesism.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“All human beings are systematically socialized to oppress cattle, chickens, snakes, mice, dogs, and all other nonhuman individuals. After the fashion of Sojouner Truth, might cows and chickens ask: “Ain’t I a female, too?” And would not dogs and snakes ask, "Ain't I a living being, too?”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“Passer à la violence' - celle de l'action directe et de la revendication sans compromission - est ainsi inextricablement lié au constat que la revendication d'une égalité civile et civique ne peut être adressée pacifiquement à l'Etat puisque ce dernier est le principal instigateur des inégalités, qu'il est vain de lui demander justice car il est précisément l'instance première qui institutionnalise l'injustice sociale, qu'il est donc illusoire de se mettre sous sa protection puisqu'il produit ou soutient les mêmes dispositifs qui vulnérabilisent, qu'il est même insensé de s'en remettre à lui pour nous défendre puisqu'il est précisément celui qui arme ceux qui nous frappent.”
― Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre, une philosophie de la violence

“Without the voices from the edges publicly demanding, wailing, and protesting, institutions and systems that engage in exclusionary, oppressive, or marginalizing practices continue to operate with apathy or impunity. Destructive systems do not change themselves, and those working for change within these systems can’t do it alone.”
― Bruce Reyes-Chow, In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World

“Having an institutional blessing to be called a ‘writer’, ‘journalist’ or an ‘academic’ does not really make one so. In fact, anyone with institutional support and titles is a suspect more than anything else.”
― Louis Yako

“We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. Aside from idealism, it's pragmatic—if marginalized users are the people being targeted the most and being targeted the worst, then designing solutions that focus on the majority and treat the marginalized users as edge cases is not logically sound, because they aren't. Conversely, there's no reason to assume that the solutions that work for the people who need it most wouldn't also work for people who aren't as much at risk.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate