Anne Braden on Rejecting White Privilege

I believe that no white woman reared in the South -- or perhaps anywhere in this racist country -- can find freedom as a woman until she deals in her own consciousness with the question of race. We grow up little girls -- absorbing a hundred stereotypes about ourselves and our role in life, our secondary position, our destiny to be a helpmate to a man or men. But we also grow up white -- absorbing the stereotypes of race, the picture of ourselves as somehow privileged because of the color of our skin. The two mythologies become intertwined, and there is no way to free ourselves from one without dealing with the other. …

We can make a beginning toward building a really strong women’s movement as we openly reject and fight racist myths that have kept us divided.

I don’t think all this will change until women -- organized and strong and asserting their humanity -- demand it.

We haven’t had that kind of strength -- and don’t now -- because of the deep chasm that divides white women from black in our society, a chasm created by crimes committed in the name of white womanhood.

It may seem paradoxical -- but in this racist society we who are white will overcome our oppression as women only when we reject once and for all the privileges conferred on us by our white skin. For the privileges are not real -- they are a device through which we are kept under control.

--Anne Braden, "A Letter to White Southern Women," December 1962

h/t The Feminist Wire