They harbored understandable resentment and repressed rage about racial oppression, but they were particularly aggrieved by the overwhelming absence of sympathy shown by white women in circumstances involving sexual and physical abuse of black women as well as situations where black children were taken away from their enslaved mothers. Again it was within this realm of shared concern (white women knew the horror of sexual and physical abuse as well as the depth of a mother’s attachment to her children) that the majority of white women who might have experienced empathic identification turned
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