Colleen

“One needs to properly possess only a couple of great thoughts--they shed light on many stretches whose illumination one would never have believed in.”
― Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms

“One of the recurring themes in the history of colonial repression is the way in which the threat of real or imagined violence towards white women became a symbol [of] insubordination and [of a] valuable property that needed to be protected from the ever-encroaching black man at all costs.

The question of European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure − when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations.

Contemporary records reveal that this was happening [during] a period of social and political uncertainty, and that the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused.”
― Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History

“Life is a continuous process of unlearning for minorities and anyone with less power. These groups - women, people of color, and, in the next chapter, disabled people - can find it very difficult to claim asexuality because it looks so much like the product of sexism, racism, ableism, and other forms of violence. The legacy of this violence is that those who belong to a group that has been controlled must do the extra work to figure out the extent to which we are still being controlled.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.

“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed