This Freire quote caught Jennifer's attention, from Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
"But even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated laborers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, [the oppressors] genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression.
Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights—although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things."
~Paolo Freire, Chapter 1, page 57
Jennifer would like to share a thought-provoking piece: Eula Bliss's writing, Time and Distance Overcome, in The Iowa Review 38.1 (2008) 83-89. doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.6414
Warning: racial violence.
Jennifer has not read all of the essay itself, but found this endnote very profound.
A Note on "Time and Distance Overcome"
"I began my research for this essay by searching for every instance of the phrase "telephone pole" in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 370 articles. As I read through these articles, starting with the oldest and working forward in time, I was not prepared to discover, in the process, a litany of lynchings. I had not intended to write an essay about lynching, but I found that, given what my research was yielding, I could not avoid it. After reading an articles headlined "Colored Scoundrel Lynched," and then another headlined "Mississippi Negro Lynched," and then another headlined "Texas Negro Lynched," I searched for every instance of the word "lynched" in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 2, 354 articles.
"I refer, in this essay to the first scholar of lynching, meaning James E. Cutler, author of the 1905 book lynch-Law, in which he writes, on the first page, "lynching is a criminal practice which is peculiar to the United States." This is debatable, of course, and very possibly not true, but there is good evidence that the Italian Antonio Meucci invented a telephone years before Bell began working on his device, so as long as we are going to lay claim to one invention, we might as well take responsibility for the other."