Kara Walker Quotes

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Social change can be painful for all involved—oppressor and oppressed.

A suppressing person isn't critical. A suppressing person is a person who denies the rights of others.

It's easier to blame the person with less power.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

What people don't know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle.

But you know, the system almost destroyed itself while it was goin' on trying to destroy us.

Truth is on the side of the oppressed.

The wrong people will do everything in their power to guarantee that the wrong political climate will continue. It seems, then, that the wrong people ensure the wrong political climate and the wrong political climate ensures the wrong people. How then to break free of this vicious circle?

Why do you all push us around?

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

I knew from reading about Sarah Grimke that she'd been given a handmaid to be her personal slave and that her name was Hetty. The only other fact I knew about her was that Sarah taught her to read: They conspired in a very subversive way, by locking the door and screening the keyhole.