Women’s cross-race dialogue fails partly from internalized racist hopelessness

Evidence

Drawing on the work of black women, work that they once dismissed as irrelevant, they now reproduce the servant-served paradigms in their scholar ship. Armed with their new knowledge of race, their willingness to say that their work is coming from a white perspective (usually without explaining what that me an s), they forget that the very focus on race and racism emerged from the concrete political effort to forge meaningful ties between women of different race and class groups. This struggle is often completely ignored. Content with the appearance of greater receptivity (the production of texts where white women discuss race is given as evidence that there has been a radical shift in direction), white women ignore the relative absence of black women’s voices, either in the construction of new feminist theory or at feminist gatherings. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 198 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Positive cross-race feminist encounters occur mainly where white women lack power over black women — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 201; Giving up on cross-racial dialogue is itself complicity in racism; Cross-racial interactions fail when groups want respect versus warmth (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Discourse about race can substitute for genuine interracial solidarity #complicates (0.72) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 198