I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.
Carter G. WoodsonRead
The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how those in power manipulate narratives to control the perceptions of the vulnerable.
Carter G. Woodsonβs quote reflects the idea that oppressors often shape the beliefs and understandings of those they dominate, persuading the weaker individuals to accept a skewed perspective on the actions of the powerful. This manipulation serves to reinforce the oppressors' control, as the weak may internalize these interpretations and feel disempowered or misled about their own circumstances and the nature of their oppression.
In practice
A speech on social justice addressing how narratives shape societal perceptions.
I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.
If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.
If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess.
This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.
The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with vigour and ethical meaning.
We start making every child ambitious, and ambition means you cannot love; ambition is anti-love. Ambition needs fight, ambition needs struggle, ambition needs you to use others as a means.
No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.
The shortening of devotions starves the soul, it grows lean and faint
We are valued in this world at the rate we desire to be valued.
There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
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