Hood Feminism Quotes

No woman has to be respectable to be valuable.

Sometimes being a good ally is about opening the door for someone instead of insisting that your voice is the only one that matters.

There’s nothing feminist about having so many resources at your fingertips and choosing to be ignorant. Nothing empowering or enlightening in deciding that intent trumps impact. Especially when the consequences aren’t going to be experienced by you, but will instead be experienced by someone from a marginalized community.

Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational.

One of the biggest issues with mainstream feminist writing has been the way the idea of what constitutes a feminist issue is framed. We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met.

An intersectional approach to feminism requires understanding that too often mainstream feminism ignores that Black women and other women of color are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of hate.

Mainstream, white-centered feminism hasn't just failed women of color, it has failed white women.

America loves the myth of a meritocracy more than anything else, because it lets us ignore the reality of the impact of bigotry.

For women of color, the expectation that we prioritize gender over race, that we treat the patriarchy as something that gives all men the same power, leaves many of us feeling isolated.

The tone policing of respectability ensures that the fight for equality becomes the responsibility of the oppressed.

Feminism as a career is the province of the privileged; it's hard to read dozens of books on feminist theory while you're working in a hair salon or engaged in the kinds of jobs that put food on the table but also demand a lot of physical and mental energy.

Ignoring the treatment of the most marginalized women doesn't set a standard that can protect any woman.

Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn't about manners; it's about a methodology of controlling the conversation.

The problem has never been the ways that victims don’t tell, so much as it has been that some victims aren’t seen as valuable enough to protect.

Mainstream white feminists will have to confront the racism of white women and the harm it does, without passing the buck to white men.

We expect marginalized voices to ring out no matter what obstacles they face, and then we penalize them for not saying the right thing in the right way.

On average, American states spend $88,000 to incarcerate a young person, but allot an average of $10,000 to educate them.

Too often white women decide that when they feel uncomfortable, upset, or threatened, they can turn to the patriarchy for protection. Because they don't want to lose that protection (dubious as it is), they stand by when it's convenient, and challenge it only when it directly threatens them. Yet, they know they benefit from it being challenged, and thus rely on others to do the heaviest lifting. They fail to recognize the conflicted relationship they have with the patriarchy includes a certain cowardice around challenging not only it, but other women who have embraced it.

Feminism in the hood is for everyone, because everyone needs it.

Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants, because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right.

Feminism is the work that you do, and the people you do it for who matter more than anything else.

We have to be willing to embrace the full autonomy of people who are less privileged and understand that equity means making access to opportunity easier, not deciding what opportunities they deserve.

Attempts to tie access to food programs to labor, to respectability, to anything but being a human in need are ultimately less about solving the problem of hunger and more about shame.

No one can live up to the standards set by racist stereotypes like this that position Black women as so strong they don’t need help, protection, care, or concern. Such stereotypes leave little to no room for real Black women with real problems. In fact, even the most “positive” tropes about women of color are harmful precisely because they dehumanize us and erase the damage that can be done to us by those who might mean well, but whose actions show that they don’t actually respect us or our right to self-determine what happens on our behalf.

If your child is killed by police, if the water in your community is poisoned, if a mockery is made of your grief, how do you feel? Do you want to be calm and quiet? Do you want to forgive in order to make everyone else comfortable? Or do you want to scream, to yell, to demand justice for the wrongs done? Anger gets the petitions out, it motivates marches, it gets people to the ballot. Anger is sometimes the only fuel left at the end of a long, horrible day, week, month, or generation.

Just as fear of a Black man was used to justify lynching, fear of offending other white women has become the excuse for not confronting the harm white women are doing to themselves in their haste to uphold the limited protections offered by white privilege.

It's time to treat domestic violence and hate speech as the neon red flags they are and take the necessary steps to reduce the risks instead of hoping that they'll go away.

Girls in the hood must learn to present only the fraction of themselves deemed acceptable while also working twice as hard to get half as far in life.

We are part of the society that we are fighting to change, and we cannot absolve ourselves of our role in it.

But as adults, as people who are doing hard work, you cannot expect your feelings to be the center of someone else’s struggle.

Now mainstream feminism has to step up, has to give itself to a place where it spends more time offering resources and less time demanding validation. Being an accomplice means that white feminism will devote its platform and resources to supporting those in marginalized communities doing feminist work.

some 40 to 60 percent of Black American girls are sexually abused before age eighteen. And those girls are likely to be labeled fast-tailed retroactively by people who need to believe that what happened to them was their fault.

Rape culture, a system that positions some bodies as deserving to be attacked, hinges on ignoring the mistreatment of marginalized women, whether they are in the inner city, on a reservation, are migrant workers, or are incarcerated. Because their bodies are seen as available and often disposable, sexual violence is tacitly normalized even as people decry its impact on those with more privilege.

We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met.

She taught me distrust. What progressives who ignore history don’t understand is that just like racism is taught, so is distrust.

There’s nothing empowering about the idea that the road to their sexual freedom is making a fetish costume out of a culture.

He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature. And so it is Goldilocks who goes to the home of the three bears, Little Red Riding Hood who converses with the wolf, Dorothy who befriends a lion, Snow White who talks to the birds, Cinderella with mice as her allies, the Mermaid who is half fish, Thumbelina courted by a mole. (And when we hear in the Navaho chant of the mountain that a grown man sits and smokes with bears and follows directions given to him by squirrels, we are surprised. We had thought only little girls spoke with animals.) We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear.

Going into a white woman’s kitchen did nothing to help other women. Those jobs had always been available, always paid poorly, always been dangerous

But niceness is more than helping; it is stopping to listen, to connect, to be gentle with your words.

White privilege knows no gender.

Hunger has a lifelong impact, shaping not only someone's relationship with food but also their health and the health of their community. Hunger, real hunger, provokes desperation and leads to choices that might otherwise be unfathomable.

Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met.

You can argue that conservative values are at odds with feminist ideology, but ultimately the question has to be not only what women are we empowering, but also what are we empowering them to do. White women aren't just passive beneficiaries of racist oppression; they are active participants.

Sometimes solidarity is just that simple. Step up, reach back, and keep pushing forward.

Being a marginalized parent is an emotional and social tightrope over a hard floor without a net.

There’s no magic shield in being middle class that can completely insulate you from the consequences of being in a body that’s already been criminalized for existing.

Feminism can't afford to prioritize supporting whiteness over actively combating racist and misogynistic policies that will end up hurting everyone.

There’s nothing feminist about having so many resources at your fingertips and choosing to be ignorant. Nothing empowering or enlightening in deciding that intent trumps impact.

if you look around, if you look outside the bubble that privilege has created where you don’t have to worry about gun violence on a regular basis, you’ll see it’s a public epidemic that we ignore.

Women of color declaring to white women, I'm not here to clean up your mess, carry your spear, hold your hand, or cheer you on while I suffer in silence. I'm not here to raise your children, assuage your guilt, build your platforms, or fight your battles. I'm here for my community because no one else will stand up for us but us

We need to let go of respectability politics and understand that whiteness as a construct will never approve of us, and that the approval of white supremacy is not something that we or any community should be seeking. We have to be willing to embrace the full autonomy of people who are less privileged and understand that equity means making access to opportunity easier, not deciding which opportunities they deserve.

The fundamental problem with white feminism has always been that it refuses to admit that the primary goal is shifting power to white women, and no one else. It says that it supports all white women being empowered regardless of whether they are ethical or not. For white feminism, anyone can claim to be an ally as long as they occasionally do the right thing, but the reality is that the performance of allyship is ultimately untrustworthy and useless.

The myths of the Strong Black Woman from chapter one, the Wise Indian, the Submissive Asian, and the Sassy Latina do more than show up in bad TV shows. They influence the perception that women who are not white do not experience a full range of emotions, much less suffer from the same mental health issues.

The labor (physical and emotional) of low-income women is often abused and unappreciated. We are constantly watching them struggle and pretending it is voluntary and not a result of a system upheld by a powerful few that is fundamentally anti-Black and patriarchal.

We don’t have bigotry by accident; it’s built and sustained by the same cultural institutions we’re taught to revere.

We’re all on stolen land in the United States, but some communities are far less likely to be impacted by redlining or subprime lending.

Instead of treating them like self-determining agents in their own lives, they treat their girls as only capable of responding to what is happening around them.

When some victims are seen as disposable, then eventually all victims are disposable,

WHY IS IT that we’re more inclined to create programs to combat obesity than ones that meaningfully address hunger?

I tell you this story because sometimes the story of your life is the story of a lot of lives.

In fact, the most realistic approach to solidarity is one that assumes that sometimes it simply isn’t your turn to be the focus of the conversation.

Women ain't hood ornament.

Imagine this: Instead of waiting in her tower, Rapunzel slices off her long, golden hair with a carving knife, and then uses it to climb down to freedom. Just as she’s about to take the poison apple, Snow White sees the familiar wicked glow in the old lady’s eyes, and slashes the evil queen’s throat with a pair of sewing scissors. Cinderella refuses everything but the glass slippers from her fairy godmother, crushes her stepmother’s windpipe under her heel, and the Prince falls madly in love with the mysterious girl who dons rags and blood-stained slippers. Imagine this: Persephone goes adventuring with weapons hidden under her dress. Persephone climbs into the gaping chasm. Or, Persephone uses her hands to carve a hole down to hell. In none of these versions is Persephone’s body violated unless she asks Hades to hold her down with his horse-whips. Not once does she hold out on eating the pomegranate, instead biting into it eagerly and relishing the juice running down her chin, staining it red. In some of the stories, Hades never appears and Persephone rules the underworld with a crown of her own making. In all of them, it is widely known that the name Persephone means Bringer of Destruction. Imagine this: Red Riding Hood marches from her grandmother’s house with a bloody wolf pelt. Medusa rights the wrongs that have been done to her. Eurydice breaks every muscle in her arms climbing out of the land of the dead. Imagine this: Girls are allowed to think dark thoughts, and be dark things. Imagine this: Instead of the dragon, it’s the princess with claws and fiery breath who smashes her way from the confines of her castle and swallows men whole.

When white feminism ignores history, ignores that the tears of white women have the power to get Black people killed while insisting that all women are on the same side, it doesn’t solve anything.

Being skeptical of those who promise they care but do nothing to help those who are marginalized is a life skill that can serve you well when your identity makes you a target. There’s no magic shield in being middle class that can completely insulate you from the consequences of being in a body that’s already been criminalized for existing.

Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met. As

none of those programs are enough to effectively combat hunger on their own. They need more. More resources, more employees, more efforts by the government to solve the problem across the country. And they don’t have the connections, resources, or time to lobby politicians and provide services. Charity may begin at home, but it is fundamentally incapable of solving a societal ill without some measure of government-funded programs that are less focused on being restrictive or punitive and more focused on making sure that the most vulnerable are cared for regardless of income.

Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn’t about manners; it’s about a methodology of controlling the conversation. Polite white people who respond to calls for respect, for getting boots off necks with demand for decorum, aren’t interested in resistance or disruption. They are interested in control. They replicate the manners of Jim Crow America, demanding deference and obedience; they want the polite facade instead of disruption. They insist that they know best what should be done when attempting to battle and defeat bias, but in actuality they’re just happy to be useless. They are obstacles to freedom who feel no remorse, who provide no valuable insight, because ultimately, they are content to get in the way. They’re oppression tourists, virtue-signaling volunteers who are really just here to get what they can and block the way, so no others can pass without meeting whatever arbitrary standards they create. And if you get enough of them in one place, they can prevent any real progress from occurring while they reap the benefits of straddling white supremacy and being woke. They have less power than they think, than anyone realizes, but like any small predator, they manage to be flashy enough to be seen.

Why should women have to give up their name upon marriage, as if they are nothing but hood ornaments to their husbands! And why should a child be identified only by their father’s name and not the mother’s, who by the way, is the root of all creation - who is creation! We are never going to have a civilized society with equity as foundation, unless we acknowledge and abolish such filthy habits that we’ve been practicing as tradition. Showing off our skin-deep support for equality few days a year doesn’t eliminate all the discriminations from the world, we have to live each day as the walking proof of equality, ascension and assimilation.

Code-switching in these spaces is a key skill that not everyone can or will acquire. And the toll of not being adept at this skill plays out not only in how girls are treated by their peers but also in how they are treated by the systems they encounter. A girl who is seen as fitting into the patriarchy’s preset mold of a “good girl,” one who won’t engage in any of that pesky interest in herself, her own goals and concerns, but who is instead seemingly willing to be directed, will often find herself offered more resources by teachers, employers, or other people with power to effect a positive change in her life. A counterpart who is messier, louder, and more invested in being true to herself and where she came from, no matter how much that self departs from accepted ideas of a “good girl,” is unlikely to benefit from the same resources.

I’m a feminist. Mostly. I’m an asshole. Mostly.

Respectability has not saved women of color from racism; it won’t save any woman from sexism or outright misogyny.

There was a sense that when the targets of oppression weren’t white, it was fine to vote based on “economic distress” and not solidarity with other women.

The feminism at the University of Chicago on offer to the low-income Black women living in the neighborhood might as well have been a scene from The Help.

We expect cis women to be harmed, so we focus our energy on warning them to avoid danger.

Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants. Because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right.

learned that being a problem child meant I could be an adult who went her own way and got things done, because I am not so focused on pleasing other people at my own expense.

For many who are coming to feminism in the way that I did, through lived experience, the work that feminists do in the community is more relevant than any text.

If a liberation movement's own representatives are engaging with each other oppressively, then what progress can the movement make without fixing that internal problem?

In many ways, respectability politics treat assimilation and accommodation as mandatory. Yet we know respectability comes with no guarantees... We are expected to constantly adjust our own behavior to avoid the racist, classist, and sexist stereotypes other people might assign to us. But while we put this pressure on each other and ourselves, it does little to stop the impact of racism... when Black women internalize the standards set by racism and hold ourselves to oppressive standards, we create a self-replicating schism inside our own communities.

It's easy to blame the patriarchy, to rightfully point at the men who rape and hold them accountable. What's harder is to notice the women who sometimes passively direct rapists toward their victims by contributing to the hypersexualization of women of color under the guise of empowerment... Feminist white women who think "sexy Pocahontas" is an empowering look instead of lingering fetishization of the rape of a child. The same imagery they claim to find sexually empowering is rooted in the myth of white women's purity and every other woman's sexual availability.

...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music—one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists— for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have.

Yes, it is important for women to work together against gender oppression. But which women? Which forms of gender oppression? After all, cis women can and do oppress trans women, white women have the institutional and social power to oppress women of color, able-bodied women can oppress people with disabilities, and so on. Oppression of women isn’t just an external force; it happens between groups of women as well.

Because so much of what feminists had to say of her time was laden with racist and classist assumptions about women like her, she focused on what she could control and was openly disdainful of a lot of feminist rhetoric.

When white feminism ignores history, ignores that the tears of white women have the power to get Black people killed while insisting that all women are on the same side, it doesn't solve anything. Look at Carolyn Bryant, who lied about Emmett Till whistling at her in 1955. Despite knowing who had killed him, and that he was innocent of even the casual disrespect she had claimed, she carried on with the lie for another fifty years after his lynching and death

However, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” only works as clichéd shorthand; in reality the enemy of my enemy may be my enemy as well. Being caught between groups that hate you for different aspects of your identity means none of you are safe.

If mainstream white feminism wants something to do, wants to help, this is one area where it is important to step back, to wait to be invited in. If no invitation is forthcoming? Well, you can always challenge the white patriarchy. There’s always space to combat the prison industrial complex, to advocate for the reduction of incarceration as a solution for societal concerns. There’s space to limit the harm done to marginalized communities without intruding on the internal work that insiders can and must do. And that space can operate from the outside.

They have less power than they think, than anyone realizes, but like any small predator, they manage to be flashy enough to be seen. In general, feminism as a career is the province of the privileged; it’s hard to read dozens of books on feminist theory while you’re working in a hair salon or engaged in the kinds of jobs that put food on the table but also demand a lot of physical and mental energy. For many who are coming to feminism in the way that I did, through lived experience, the work that feminists do in the community is more relevant than any text.

When feminist rhetoric is rooted biases like racism, ableism, transmisogyny, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia, it automatically works against marginalized women and against any concept of solidarity. It's not enough to know that other women with different experiences exist' you must also understand that they have their own femiminist formed by that experience. Whether it's an argument that women who wear the hijab must be "saved" from it, or reproductive-justice arguments that paint having a disabled baby as the worst possible outcome, the reality is that feminism can be marginalizing

Allies tend to crowd out the space for anger with their demands that things be comfortable for them. They want to be educated, want someone to be kind to them whether they have earned that kindness or not. The process of becoming an ally requires a lot of emotional investment, and far too often the heavy lifting of that emotional labor is done by the marginalized, not the privileged. But part of that journey from being a would-be ally to becoming an ally to actually becoming an accomplice is anger. Anger doesn't have to be erudite to be valid. It doesn't have to be nice or calm in order to be heard. In fact, I would argue that despite narratives that present the anger of Black women as dangerous, that render being angry in public as a reason to tune out the voices of marginalized people, it is that anger and the expressing of it that saves communities. No one has ever freed themselves from oppression by asking nicely.

When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.

Ignoring the treatment of the most marginalized women doesn’t set a standard that can protect any women. Instead it sets up arbitrary respectability-centered goalposts against which all women are supposed to measure their behavior. That’s not freedom; that’s just a more elaborate series of cages that will never be comfortable or safe.

Counter to that centering of hypermasculinity is Black feminism, which recognizes that fighting the white supremacist patriarchy outside the community is different than fighting the toxic masculinity inside the community. There’s a desire to see the same men who are so adversely impacted by racism succeed, but not at the expense of Black women.

Churches, politicians, even some educational institutions teach hate and normalize it long before it ends up in a song lyric or being parroted in an interview by a newly famous sixteen-year-old. In that way the hood is a reflection of the wider world. We don’t have bigotry by accident; it’s built and sustained by the same cultural institutions we’re taught to revere.

We love the idea of a Strong Black Woman, celebrate those who, like Anita Hill, manage to continue to have a successful career in the aftermath. But what about those who can’t do that? For those without a pass back to middle class or the ivory tower, what resources are available? The same feminism that holds them up to fight the battles turns away when the war is over and doesn’t bother to tend the wounds, emotional or otherwise.

Colorism is a cultural institution that has skewed access to opportunity by consistently placing those with lighter skin in positions of privilege. This is why things like paper bag tests and comb tests proliferated in some parts of higher-income Black communities. For the paper bag test, a paper bag would be held against your skin and if you were darker than the bag, you weren’t admitted to a nightclub, a fraternity, or sometimes even a church.

When media criticizes Ciara’s faux locs and then calls the same hairstyle edgy on a Kardashian, what message is being sent to young girls of color? If bandannas are a hot new accessory for young white women in the pages of Elle and a reason to throw handcuffs on a Latina in high school, then what message is received? What impact does it have to pretend that cornrows on white women are the same as a weave on Black women when only one is likely to lose their job over a hairstyle? We know colorism exists, but do we grasp the ways that the message that lighter skin is better are reinforced before we criticize bleaching? It’s important to remember that this is all happening within a society that privileges lighter skin over darker skin, that prioritizes able bodies over disabled bodies, that sees being cisgender as the only option. Although not everyone will develop mental illnesses around their body image as a result of this environment, for those who do, the illness is often reinforced

In a way, it makes sense that white feminism reflexively protects white women from the consequences of their actions. A movement that wants equal rights to oppress has a vested interest in not cleaning house. But the innately abusive nature of white supremacy has shaped white feminism, seen to it that investment in white supremacy is easier than investment in actual equality for themselves with all women. White feminism has to move past any idea of being an ally and into being an accomplice in order for it to be meaningful. Accomplice feminists will actively and directly challenge white supremacist people, policies, instiutions, and cultural norms. They would know they do not need to have to have the same stake in the fight to work with marginalized communities. They would put aside their egos and their need to be centered in our struggles in favor of following our instructions because they would internalize the reality that their privilege doesn't make them experts on our oppression.

Class differences make poor white people the target of oppressive structures. The idea that poor white people are morally and socially inept, too ignorant to be a part of the wider world excuses them from the racist systems that they lack the access to create even when they benefit from them. It's that internal oppression that whiteness enacts on itself that helps create a narrative that the world is out to get working class white people, and that people of color are specifically at fault for their problems.

In general children from low-income families are at risk of being failed by schools because of the erroneous belief that their parents lack ambition for them. A focus on the need for aspirations as widely set is necessary for closing the achievement gap between marginalized and privileged people. Yet an environment where students may not see themselves represented in person or on the page, what exactly are they inspiring to? Who sets those standards and are they achievable in the wider world without culturally sensitive and competent teachers?