Angela Davis's 1983 book Women, Race & Class is a masterwork of cultural commentary. Davis tracks the Women's Movement from its earliest days chronicling the involvement and contributions of Black Women and the frequently dismissive and racist attitudes White Women held toward them, but not their work.
The book is fast-moving and filled with citations from a bibliography that would make any library jealous. Speeches, letters, prison records all contribute to give more texture to a story that many of us are only barely taught, if at all. Here are examples of women working to better the entire world and women working to improve only a very small, very white section of that world.
I cannot emphasize the importance of this book enough. It should be required reading for anyone in these here United States of America.
White ladies who are feminists frequently fall into traps of white feminism (they get racist). This book is a lifetime's worth of history about how and why that happens. Not the racism part, that's the part about living in a society that denegrates all non-white people in order to extend specific privileges to white people and everything that entails. No. This is about the role of racism and classism in the Women's Movement.
Davis's writing is so sharp and fast - her examples and citations come thick and fast. She is a thorough researcher and excellent writer. It is not possible (or desirable) to hide your critical awareness in the craft of this work, and it is something she uses to good effect. While I will have to read it again to have a better grasp of the relationships of the people involved, the network of privilege and its corrosive effects on social justice movements is absolutely secure in my thinking.
It is a simple thing to be a White Woman claiming that being empowered as a women helps raise the bar for all women. It is also an egregious and deadly lie. Davis does not, in this book, ask for guilt or shame. She offers questions about complicity and ambition instead. Her work is pointed and purposeful. It is troubling and necessary.
This book is what I measure my decisions against - this is where I go when I have questions about how to feminist while white. Or, more accurately, how Not to feminist while white.
It's short. Shouldn't take long. Will change everything. Go for it.
#40days40books list
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