we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindl… - Assata Shakur

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we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.

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About Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur (born JoAnne Deborah Byron, July 16, 1947) is an activist who was found guilty in the 1973 murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. Shakur was incarcerated in several prisons in the 70s. She escaped from U.S. prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba in political asylum since 1984. Shakur is the step-aunt/godmother of the late Tupac Shakur.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Birth Name: JoAnne Deborah Byron
Alternative Names: Joanne Deborah Byron Joanne Deborah Chesimard Assata Olugbala Shakur
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Additional quotes by Assata Shakur

Every day out in the streets now, i remind myself that black people in amerika are oppressed. It's necessary that I do that. People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be accurately aware of being a slave.

I got into heated arguments with brothers and sisters who claimed that the oppression of black people was only a question of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white ones. Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn't take too much to figure that black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. It would burn me every time some body talked about Black people climbing the ladder of success. Anytime you're talking about a ladder, you're talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you got a system with a top and bottom, Black people are always going to end up at the bottom because we're easiest to discriminate against. That's why i couldn't see fighting within the system. Both the Democratic and Republican party are controlled by millionaires. They are interested in holding on to their power while i was interested in taking it away. They were interested in supporting fascist dictatorships in South and Central America, while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in seeing racist, fascist regimes in Africa while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in defeating the Viet Cong and i was interested in seeing their liberation.

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