This book is incredible. I know I have a lot to learn about feminism and racism, and this book was, to me, a great starting point for that.
The author, Bell Hooks, discusses the intersectionality of oppression of the black woman in a very accessible and well articulated way that made this book easy to understand. She brought up many points I hadn't considered, or had only scratched the surface of thinking about. The book obviously deals with some very heavy topics, such as slavery and racism, and it does so without being gratuitous, but while still explaining things very plainly and bluntly. Hooks does not sugar coat or mince her words, though I did find certain things to be more repetitive than I prefer, there is a point to the repetition.
I'll admit, I'm nervous about articulating my opinions of the content of this book, especially as a white person of indeterminate gender (though I'm usually perceived as a white woman), I am doing my best to better understand the privilege I hold, but it makes me uncomfortable to discuss it, mostly due to fear of being inadvertently racist. I know that I will likely never fully unlearn the racism I was taught by society, and therefore being scared of being accidentally racist will likely be a persistent issue, and if I allow this fear to dictate my actions I would likely never speak up when it comes to matters of race. The whole point of this blog is for me to process these thoughts and feelings. Therefore, I am going to do my best to articulate myself in a racially conscious way, but I am almost certainly going to 'mess up'.
I would say that the main point of discussion of this book is the erasure of black women. Hooks talks several times about how, in the early days of the feminist movement in the US, white women would compare themselves and their rights to those of 'blacks,' when what they actually meant was to compare themselves to black men. If the white woman had wanted a more accurate comparison she would have compared herself to black women, but, because of many factors that Hooks explains better than I ever could, white women were intentionally disregarding the existence of black women. One of the main reasons for this are because white women saw black women as competition for white men's sexual attention, while they disregarded that the sexual attention paid to black women was, at the time, generally unwanted, coerced, or forced upon the black woman.
Another reason is patriarchy, the white male patriarchy sought to keep women 'in their place,' that is, a a domestic house wife that is subservient to 'her man.' They did this is many ways, not the least of which is controlling and minimizing the rights of women for centuries, hell, we even see it today with the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022. While right wingers claim that it was an issue of states rights, it is clearly driven by a desire to control women and strip them of rights, but that is a separate discussion. Back to patriarchy, one of the ways that the patriarchy sought to keep women 'in their place' is by 'upholding the rights of men' and granting black men the right to vote a full 50 years before women, which only fed the rhetoric that white women were more oppressed than 'blacks,' again, refusing to acknowledge black women, and making the term 'blacks' synonymous with black men.
Another thing that stuck out to me was the discussion of how black women are talked about in society, and how they're viewed, even today. You often see black women hailed as being strong and resilient simply because they continue to exist in the face of oppression. This rhetoric is then used to imply that black women are not at a disadvantage, because they can still 'tough it out.' But is someone really at less of a disadvantage simply because they continue on in the face of oppression? No. The answer is no. Black women are oppressed, and their oppression is erased, time and time again. The methodology of this erasure takes many forms, and I could write for the rest of my life and never be able to accurately and completely cover all the modes of oppression faced by black women, and I certainly could not articulate it better than Hooks.
Shuttle is here now, so I guess thats it.
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