Some of My Favorite Quotes From Past Readings
“Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism ” by bell hooks
“… for woman’s suffering however great could not take precedence over male pain.”
“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. Usually, when people talk about the “strength” of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.”
“And black women are not accepted because they are seen as a threat to the existing race-sex hierarchy.”
“…white male slave-owners created a body of myths to discredit the contributions of black females; one such myth was the notion that they were all masculinized sub-human creatures. Black female slaves had shown that they were capable of performing so-called “manly” labor, that they were able to endure hardship, pain, and privation but could also perform those so-called “womanly” tasks of housekeeping, cooking, and child rearing. Their ability to cope effectively in a sexist-defined “male” role threatened patriarchal myths about the nature of woman’s inherent physiological difference and inferiority.”
“…black women embraced the label matriarch because it allowed them to regard themselves as privileged. This merely indicates how effectively colonizers are able to distort the reality of the colonized so that they embrace concepts that actually do them more harm than good.”
“White colonizers encourage black women, who are economically oppressed and victimized by sexism and racism, to believe that they are matriarchs, that they exercise some social and political control over their lives. Once black women are deluded and imagine that we have power we don’t really possess, the possibility that we might organize collectively to fight against sexist-racist oppression is reduced.”
“…people are absolutely unwilling to admit that the damaging effects of racism on black men neither prevents them from being sexist oppressors nor excuses or justifies their sexist oppression of black women.”
“Many black men who express the greatest hostility toward the white male power structure are often eager to gain access to that power. Their expressions of rage and anger are less a critique of the white male patriarchal social order and more a reaction against the fact that they have not been allowed full participation in the power game.”
“…changes in the American capitalist economy have had the greatest impact on the status of women. More women than ever before are in America’s work force not because of feminism but because families can no longer rely on the income of the father. Feminism has been used as a psychological tool to make women think that work they might otherwise see as boring, tedious, and time consuming is liberating. For whether feminism exists or not, women must work.”
“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.”