he taught us to think long-term...to have a big picture sense of change. And to know that you can't always tell in the moment if you're winning or lo… - Aurora Levins Morales

One of the first things a colonizing power, a new ruling class, or a repressive regime does is attack the sense of history of those they wish to dominate by attempting to take over and control their relationships to their own past...A strong sense of their own history among the dominated undermines the project of domination. It provides an alternative story, one in which oppression is the result of human behavior, of historical events and choices, and not natural law.

I am thinking of the year I tried to teach the history of Western feminism on a North-South axis-U.S., Latin American and Caribbean feminism, not U.S. and European-and first heard the names of these women you rubbed shoulders with, Bertha Lutz, Clara Gonzalez, Elena Torres, Minerva Bernardino, Amalia de Castilla Ledón, Paca Navas, Irma de Alvarado. No one in my class had ever heard of any of them, not a single one. Not the Latin American delegates who put women into the U.N. Charter and saw to the creation of the Commission on the Status of Women; not the women who openly balked at the militarization of the continent in 1947; not any of the writers, thinkers, and agitators who had struggled not only for suffrage (which came far later to them than to women in the United States and kept them militant through the lull between our first and second waves) but also for divorce and child custody, nationality independent of a husband's, national self-determination, and living wages, and against dictatorships and fascism and the arming of the Americas.

As in the case of the false memory movement, the privileged accuse the disempowered of oppressing them. Teaching the histories, cultures, and thought of the 99 percent violates the "freedom" of privileged white heterosexual men by forcing them to participate in a world in which their interests and perceptions are not the exclusive priority of everyone.