Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

by bell hooks

Racism has always been a divisive force separating black men and white men, and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups.

The idealized woman becomes property, symbol, and ornament; she is stripped of her essential human qualities. The devalued woman becomes a different kind of object; she is the spittoon in which men release their negative anti-woman feelings.

The nature of fascism is such that it controls, limits, and restricts leaders as well as the people fascists oppress. Freedom (and by that term I do not mean to evoke some wishy-washy hang-loose do-as-you-like world) as positive social equality that grants all humans the opportunity to shape their destinies in the most healthy and communally productive way can only be a complete reality when our world is no longer racist or sexist.

To black women the issue is not whether white women are more or less racist than white men, but that they are racist.

Every women’s movement in America from its earliest origin to the present day has been built on a racist foundation— a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political ideology.

While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the American white woman’s experience in which that experience is assumed to be the American woman’s experience.

In a racially imperialist nation such as ours, it is the dominant race that reserves for itself the luxury of dismissing racial identity while the oppressed race is made daily aware of their racial identity. It is the dominant race that can make it seem that their experience is representative.

Very important line

In much of the literature written by white women on the “woman question” from the 19th century to the present day, authors will refer to “white men” but use the word “woman” when they really mean “white woman.” Concurrently, the term “blacks” is often made synonymous with black men.

For a few lucky men, for far fewer women, work has occasionally been a source of meaning and creativity. But for most of the rest it remains even now forced drudgery in front of the ploughs, machines, words or numbers—pushing products, pushing switches, pushing papers to eke out the wherewithal of material existence.

More than a hundred years have passed since the day Sojourner Truth stood before an assembled body of white women and men at an anti-slavery rally in Indiana and bared her breasts to prove that she was indeed a woman.

Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best places… and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!… I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well—and ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children and I seen ’em mos all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus hear—and ain’t I a woman?