The Color of Privilege : Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism (Critical Perspectives on Women and Gender)

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Summary: Acknowledging the intersections of race, class, and gender
Review: I applaud Hurtado for discussing feminism among women of Color-- she capitalizes the C -- without resorting to simplisticgeneralizations about ethnicity and economic class.

In one of the book's strongest contributions to the ongoing conversation on race and feminism, Hurtado acknowledges the major factor separating white feminists from feminists of Color: their different relationships to white men. Hurtado concludes that white women's position (living in the same homes as white men) avails them to an "economic cushion," a term coined by Phyllis Marynick Palmer. Without trivializing the oppression of White women, Hurtado shows how White patriarchy subjects them through seduction (to propogate the race) while oppressing women of Color through rejection.

She makes another noteworthy contribution by considering Chicanas' decisions not to leave their sexist communities, explaining how women are subordinated within their own cultural groups through sexuality. She also advocates a means for theorizing about oppression and liberation that considers the privilege of the theorist, a feminist epistemology that would not separate the scholar from her/his findings but instead would require a "disrobing of self" not found in masculinist paradigms (p. 128).

Hurtado's suggests that, rather than exchange Eurocentric domination for Afrocentric domination, we consider the role of privilege as we create a "reflexive theory of subordination" that seeks "types of leadership models that lead to strategic action to accomplish particular goals" (p. 159). The key term here is reflexive. Hurtado wants each of us to consider our own biases, the baggage we each bring into our discussions of ineaquality. She acknowledges that some feminists have tried this approach, but adds that we need to encourage more of them to do so. Hurtado contends that we cannot question white power solidarity thoroughly until white people become racial whistle-blowers, fully exposing their privilege.

The Color of Privilege is a rare find: an insightful, well-written scholarly text that will interest both the activist and the academician.

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Summary: This book was an eye-opener!
Review: This book is definitely an eye-opener! I just want to thank Aida for exposing the elite white-male establishment for their role in oppressing both women of color and white women. White women, being the biological mothers of white men, have easy yet conditional access to wealth, education, benefits, and political power because of their linkages to white men. Women of color (black, native american, and latina women) do not have such privileges. With the exception of very few privileged women of color such as Linda Chavez, Coretta Scott King, Anita Hill, Susan Fales-Hill, Columba Bush(Jeb's wife), Wilma Mankiller, Oprah Winfrey, and Winona LaDuke, vast majority of women of color are in the working class, lower middle class, or poor working in jobs that pay less and are often heads of household due to their men having difficulty in the realm of employment, are dead, or in jail. They have very few rights to which any white person are bound to respect, are vulnerable to sterilization and birth control, and abuse not only from men of their own race, but also white men. Privileged white men have long regarded women of color not only as "beasts of burden,"valuable as workhorses to work at their factories, farms, domestic service, and sex industries, but also sexually available for their pleasure and agression yet aren't valued highly because they cannot produced racially pure offspring for those men. In fact, antimiscegenation laws were originally enacted to prevent white men from marrying women of color. If elite white men were to marry women of color in large numbers, then the whole white power structure would disappear. Power and wealth would then be shifted from white to people of color. This is why it is important for powerful elite white males to marry white women in order to ensure "racially pure" offspring as well as to keep this current system going. I would recommend those who are curious about how the system works against Americans in general to read that book, it makes people think long and hard about the racist infrastructure of the US.