Friday Aboriginal Rights Activist - Jackie Huggins

Cross posted

White liberation leaders are also fond of pointing to the analogy between blacks and women as second-class citizens in a white, male chauvinist society. One of the clearest points of similarity between the situation of blacks and women is that they have both been brainwashed into the same ‘low self-image’; they are not supposed to use their minds, they are incapable of making decisions. They are both second-class members of the society who should be kept in their place.

If white women in the women’s movement needed to make use of a black experience to emphasize women’s oppression, it would only seem logical that they focus on the black female experience – but they have not. Had white women desired to bond with black women on the basis of common oppression, they could have done so by demonstrating an awareness of the impact of sexism on the status of black women. Unfortunately, despite all the rhetoric about sisterhood and bonding, white women are not sincerely committed to bonding with black women to fight sexism. They are primarily interested in drawing attention to the oppression they consider they experience as white upper- or middle-class women.

Jackie Huggins, "Black women and women's liberation", Hecate, 13(1), 1987

Friday Activist - Jackie Huggins

Cross posted

The further notion that all women as a sex have more in common than do members of the same class is false. Upper-class women are not simply bedmates of their wealthy husbands. As a rule, they have more compelling ties that bind them together. They are economic, social, and political bedmates united in defence of private property, profiteering, militarism, racism - and the exploitation of other women. It would be quite another matter to expect any large number of wealthy women to endorse or support a revolutionary struggle which threatened their capitalist interests and privileges. Will the wives of bankers, generals, corporation lawyers, and big industrialists be firmer allies of women fighting for liberation than working-class men, black and white, who are fighting for theirs? The ruling powers breed and benefit from all forms of discrimination and oppression. Therefore, for a middle-class woman to compare her environmental situation with that of a black is totally naive. While white women are fighting to get out of the kitchen, black women are fighting to get into it.

For these reasons, many black women do not see the women's movement as relevant to their own situation. Black women, who have worked from necessity are apt to view women's liberation as a white middle-class battle irrelevant to their own, often bitter, struggle for survival. As Ida Lewis commented: "The women's liberation movement is basically a family quarrel between white women and white men." Similarly, Aboriginal women are aware of the divisiveness of feminism in terms of their own black movement. Women's liberation has meant very little to both black American women and Aboriginal women who believe that the black woman has always been placed in a position of asserting herself.

Jackie Huggins, "Black Women and Women's Liberation", Hecate 13.1, 1987, pp. 77 - 82