Being black in America is like being force to wear ill-fitting shoes. Some people adjust to it. It's always uncomfortable on your foot, but you've got to wear it because it's the only shoe you've got. You don't necessarily like it. Some people can bear the uncomfortable more than others. Some people can block it from their mind, some can't. When you see some acting docile and some acting militant, they have one thing in common: the shoe is uncomfortable. It always has been and always will be.
-Joseph Lattimore
To be in someone's else's power... induces doubts about the ordering of the universe, while those who have power can assume it is part of the natural order of things and invent or adopt ideas which justify their possession of it.
Albert Hourani
Sometimes, you have to sacrifice comfort for style- or sacrifice comfort for survival. Learning to bear pain to insure one's continued existence is necessary for people; adding to someone's else's agony for self serving gratification, however, is inexcusable.
Forcing another into a role that demands a self destruction can't be justified; yet this behavior flourishes in the land of power worship. Conventionality becomes virtue; divergence is deemed vice, and the arbitrators of conformity dispense condemnation with a tyrannical exuberance.
Rationalizing punishment provides those in power a grisly sustenance- a filthy fodder to fill the souls hollowed out by the pursuit of personal gain. The ability to inflict suffering is the nectar of necrocracy; it allows the spiritually dead the illusion of dominance and control.
Cloaking the suffering of others under the disguise of "guidance" and pressuring them to don ill-fitting garments of orthodoxy in exchange for their continued survival is the mark of a tattered morality, no matter what fashionable fascists may claim.
It should be apparent that the apparel of oppression is a wardrobe best left unclothed and closed.
