Quotes: Women, Race and Class #1

“In the same way that rape was an institutionalized ingredient of the aggression carried out against the Vietnamese people, designed to intimidate and terrorize the women, slaveowners encouraged the terroristic use of rape in order to put Black women in their place. If Black women had achieved a sense of their own strength and a strong urge to resist, then violent sexual assaults – so the slaveholders might have reasoned – would remind the women of their essential and inalterable femaleness. In the male supremacist vision of the period, this meant passivity, acquiescence and weakness.”

Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (1981), pg. 20 (Penguin Modern Classics).