A few months ago I read “Ain't I a woman” by bell hooks. Although it was a difficult read for me (something about the book structure bugged me), it was nonetheless eye opening. It made me fully realize what one means when one talks about white feminism.
Why do we set the white man as a standard?
Well, I wanted to share some exerpts from the book, what I had underlined.
“When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong—and that is simply not the case.”
“Contemporary black women could not join together to fight for women’s rights because we did not see “womanhood” as an important aspect of our identity. Racist, sexist socialization had conditioned us to devalue our femaleness and to regard race as the only relevant label of identification.”
“[...] the use of the word prostitution to describe mass sexual exploitation of enslaved black women by white men not only deflected attention away from the prevalence of forced sexual assault, it lent further credibility to the myth that black females were inherently wanton and therefore responsible for rape.”
“[...] American dream, which is in essence a masculine dream of dominance and success at the expense of others [...]”
“Conservative, reactionary white women, who increasingly represented a large majority of the participants [of the first feminist movements], were outspoken in their pronouncements that the issue of racism should not be considered worthy of attention. They did not want the issue of racism raised because they did not want to deflect attention away from their projection of the white woman as “good,” i.e., non-racist victim, and the white man as “bad,” i.e., racist oppressor. For them to have acknowledged woman’s active complicity in the perpetuation of imperialism, colonialism, racism, or sexism would have made the issue of women’s liberation far more complex.”
“Yet as they attempted to take feminism beyond the realm of radical rhetoric and into the realm of American life, they revealed that they had not changed, had not undone the sexist and racist brainwashing that had taught them to regard women unlike themselves as Others.”
“As they participated in the women’s movement they found, in their dialogues with white women in women’s groups, in women’s studies classes, at conferences, that their trust was betrayed. They found that white women had appropriated feminism to advance their own cause, i.e., their desire to enter the mainstream of American capitalism.”
“Black and white women have for so long allowed their idea of liberation to be formed by the existing status quo that they have not yet devised a strategy by which we can come together. They have had only a slave’s idea of freedom. And to the slave, the master’s way of life represents the ideal free lifestyle.”
“Feminism as a political ideology advocating social equality for all women was and is acceptable to many black women. They rejected the women’s movement when it became apparent that middle and upper class college-educated white women who were its majority participants were determined to shape the movement so that it would serve their own opportunistic ends.”
“The great majority of white women did not use their voting privileges to support women’s issues; they voted as their husbands, fathers, or brothers voted. The more militant white suffragists had hoped that women would use the vote to form their own party rather than supporting major parties that denied women social equality with men. Voting privileges for women changed in no fundamental way the lot of women in society, but they did enable women to help support and maintain the existing white racist imperialist patriarchal social order.”
“They measured black men against a standard set by white males. Since whites defined “achieving manhood” as the ability of a man to be a sole economic provider in a family, many black females tended to regard the black male as a “failed” man. In retaliation, black men openly asserted that they perceived white women as more feminine than black women. Both black females and males were uncertain about their womanhood and manhood. They were both striving to adapt themselves to standards set by the dominant white society.”
“Although white feminists denounced the white male, calling him an imperialist, capitalist, sexist, racist pig, they made women’s liberation synonymous with women obtaining the right to fully participate in the very system they identified as oppressive. Their anger was not merely a response to sexist oppression. It was an expression of their jealousy and envy of white men who held positions of power in the system while they were denied access to those positions.”
“Although the contemporary feminist movement was initially motivated by the sincere desire of women to eliminate sexist oppression, it takes place within the framework of a larger, more powerful cultural system that encourages women and men to place the fulfillment of individual aspirations above their desire for collective change.”
“A feminist ideology that mouths radical rhetoric about resistance and revolution while actively seeking to establish itself within the capitalist patriarchal system is essentially corrupt.”
“To me feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women will have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class, to name a few—and a commitment to reorganizing U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”
The sun and moon without light. Sky and earth in darkness.
Who can uplift the sinking world of women?
I pawned my jewels to sail across the open seas,
parting from my children as I left the border at Jade Gate.
Unbinding my feet to pour out a millennium’s poisons,
I arouse the spirit of women, hundreds of flowers, abloom.
Oh, this poor handkerchief made of merfolk-woven silk,
half stained with blood and half soaked in tears.
