Appropriating black suffering as metaphor signals privilege rather than oppression
Evidence
When white women talked about “Women as Niggers,” “The Third World of Women,” “Woman as Slave,” they evoked the sufferings and oppressions of non-white people to say “look at how bad our lot as white women is, why we are like niggers, like the Third World.” Of course, if the situation of upper and middle class white women were in any way like that of the oppressed people in the world, such metaphors would not have been necessary. And if they had been poor and oppressed, or women concerned about the lot of oppressed women, they would not have been compelled to appropriate the black experience. It would have been sufficient to describe the oppression of woman’s experience. A white woman who has suffered physical abuse and assault from a husband or lover, who also suffers poverty, need not compare her lot to that of a suffering black person to emphasize that she is in pain. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 419
Categorization
- SEED: The analytical move — a group’s resort to appropriative metaphor reveals its actual material privilege — could anchor an essay on when comparison metaphors signal dominance.
- XREF: connects to: Consumerism’s communication systems extract from Black bodies through platformed spectacle — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 1196; Early Black historiography challenged exclusion while accepting dominant values; Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess (+2 more)