Quotes about Legacy of Oppression

Jose Rizal

Death has always been the first sign of European civilization when introduced in the Pacific.

Malcolm X

For me, my 'X' replaced the white slave master name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed on my parental forebears.

James Baldwin

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

John Howard

Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.

Up until 1970 many Australian Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes and “adopted” or brought up in institutions to “civilize” them. In 1997 the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found the practice “genocidal.”

Philip Roth

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Eleanor Roosevelt

This younger generation is paying in many cases, for the sins of its elders.

She was referring to the European children in World War II.

Laura Lippman

I had ancestors who were slave-holders, which is a difficult piece of family history to say the least. In a recent New York Times article on the subject of modern attitudes toward our slave-holding past, the writer noted that we all want to be from "innocent origins." I _know_ I'm not. Then again, I suspect most of us are not.

Thomas Sowell

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

Laura Lippman

I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.

Art Modell

I don't want my grandchildren to go through what I went through.

Malcolm Bradbury

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

Eric Foner

Amnesia best describes America's official stance regarding slavery

For many years after the Civil War, in an effort to dignify the Southern rebellion, it was fashionable to ignore or skim over the institution of slavery in American history. Government, in particular regarded the issue as divisive even a century after the Emancipation Proclamation.

David Oyelowo

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

Legacy of Oppression Quotes