Positive cross-race feminist encounters occur mainly where white women lack power over black women
Evidence
Even though practically every black woman active in any aspect of feminist movement has a long record of horror stories documenting the insensitivity and racist aggression of individual white women, we can testify as well to those encounters that are positive, that enrich rather than diminish. Granted, such encounters are rare. They tend to take place with white women who are not in positions where they can assert power (which may be why these are seen as exceptional rather than as positive signs indicating the overall potential for growth and change, for greater togetherness). Perhaps we need to examine the degree to which white women (and all women) who assume powerful positions rely on conventional paradigms of domination to reinforce and maintain that power. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 201
Categorization
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this hold statistically, or is it partly availability — that positive encounters with powerful whites are rarer events remembered as person-specific rather than systemic?
- APHORISMS: Approximal to a life-wisdom point: people behave better toward equals and subordinates when they hold no power to exercise — check positions, not hearts, to predict conduct.
- XREF: connects to: Cross-racial intimacy between black and white women was structurally impossible under segregation — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 184; White feminists must forfeit group privilege to earn black women’s trust; Women’s cross-race dialogue fails partly from internalized racist hopelessness (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- White dominance in feminism reflects racial imperialism, not black disinterest
#expands(0.85) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 464 - Northern white women’s racial motives diverged from black women’s without blocking cooperation.
#qualifies(0.82) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 539 - Racial alliances superseded feminist solidarity between black and white women
#complicates(0.80) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 507 - Cross-racial colonial intimacies licensed women’s relative privilege and power
#expands(0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1325