Power asymmetry between colonizer and colonized shapes what the colonizer sees.

Evidence

Finally, the discourse of “the West and the Rest” could not be innocent because it did not represent an encounter between equals. The Europeans had outsailed, outshot, and outwitted peoples who had no wish to be “explored,” no need to be “discovered,” and no desire to be “exploited.” The Europeans stood, vis-à-vis the Others, in positions of dominant power. This influenced what they saw and how they saw it, as well as what they did not see. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 587

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia field’s account of how colonial perception of the Other is structured by dominance; connects to Said’s Orientalism which Hall builds up to in the next paragraphs. — connects to: Colonizers only value the colonized when they conform to the master norm — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 605; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”