“Black, Latino, Native American, and many Asian youth are portrayed as the purveyors of violence, traffickers of drugs, and as envious of commodities that they have no right to possess. Young black and Latina women are represented as sexually promiscuous and as indiscriminately propagating babies and poverty. Criminality and deviance are racialized.”

Angela Davis

Excerpt from “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex”

“It would be a mistake to regard the institutionalized pattern of rape during slavery as an expression of white men’s sexual urges, otherwise stifled by the specter of white womanhood’s chastity. That would be far too simplistic an explanation. Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist, and in the process, to demoralize their men. These observations on the role of rape during the Vietnam War could also apply to slavery: “In Vietnam, the U.S. Military Command made rape ‘socially acceptable’; in fact, it was unwritten, but clear, policy.” When GIs were encouraged to rape Vietnamese women and girls (and they were sometimes advised to “search” women “with their penises”) a weapon of mass political terrorism was forged.”

“These are women who have to fight to be included within the category 'woman,' in a way that is not dissimilar from the earlier struggles of black women and women of color who were assigned the gender female at birth.”