By far the most severe oppression that the women faced comes from the dominant culture. This oppression is shown in numerous ways, such as degradation, exploitation, and murder. As a result, the women have an understandable fear and hatred of white people. Maya describes an errand into the white section of town like this: "We were explorers walking without weapons into man-eating animals' territory" (Angelou 25). Likewise, because of Mary's beatings by Catholic nuns at the Indian Boarding School, she "hated and mistrusted every white person on sight, because [she] met only one kind" (Crow Dog 34).

One example of whites' degradation of minority peoples is the changing of their names. Native American peoples were forced to adopt Christian first names. Mary writes that her husband's family name should have been Crow Coyote, but due to a white interpreter's misunderstanding, they ended up with the name Crow Dog (Crow Dog 10). Maya also had her name changed by her white employer. Her given name is Marguerite, but the white woman called her Margaret. Then a friend of the white woman told her the name Margaret was too long and she would "call her Mary if I was you" (Angelou 107). Maya said that "every person she knew had a hellish horror of being 'called out of his name'" and that "it was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called niggers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots, and spooks" (Angelou 109).

Another element of oppression by whites is how minority peoples are exploited for their labor and cheated out of what is owed to them. Native and African Americans were relegated to the lowest and worst paying jobs by whites. Mary claimed that all the whites living near the reservation "made their living in some way by exploiting [the Indians], by using Indians as cheap labor, by running their cattle on reservation land for a mere pittance, by using [Indians] as colorful props to attract the Eastern tourists" (Crow Dog 81). Mary discovered that her people were being cheated by the reservation trading post when she was in New York. According to Mary, "everything was so much cheaper than on the reservation where the trading posts have no competition and charge what they please" (Crow Dog 112).

African Americans suffer from this exploitation also. Since they were segregated, African Americans were only allowed to attend certain schools and colleges. These colleges trained "Negro youth to be carpenters, farmers, handymen, masons, maids, cooks, and baby nurses" (Angelou 170). They were not given the opportunity to become "Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gaugins" (Angelou 179). As with the Indians, whites cheated the black cotton pickers out of their earned wages. Maya reported that "no matter how much they had picked, it wasn't enough" to pay the "staggering bill that waited on them at the white commissary downtown" (Angelou 8).

The most severe oppression suffered by minorities is the physical violence and unjustified murder committed by white people. Maya describes a gruesome scene in which she and her brother learn about the murder of a black man:

And once, we found out about a man who had been killed by whitefolks and thrown into the pond. Bailey said the man's things had been cut off and put in his pocket and he had been shot in the head, all because the whitefolks said he did 'it' to a white woman (Angelou 37).

Mary also recounts numerous times Indians were murdered by white men. The following account is particularly inhuman:

Not long before that a Sioux, Raymond Yellow Thunder, a humble, hard-working man, had been stripped naked and forced at gunpoint to dance in an American Legion Hall at Gordon, Nebraska. Later he was beaten to death