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186 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
In a conversation with a Chicano historian about white scholars writing about Chicano history, he mentioned a conference where a famous white male spoke of the necessity of white people writing on Chicanos so as to give the subject scholarly legitimacy, to ensure that such work would receive proper attention, consideration, and scholarly respectStill, this nuanced essay isn't condemnatory of all such writing, and she critiques Joanna Russ' book How to Suppress Women's Writing for the way Russ humbly 'stresses the importance of literature by women of color by saying that as a white woman scholar she was not in a position to speak about these works. Towards the end of the book, she listed many quotes from women of color ostensibly encouraging readers to read these writers, to see their words as important. Yet this gesture disturbed me because it also implied that women of color represent this group whose experiences and whose writing is so removed from that of white women that they cannot address such work critically and analytically. This assumption may very well reinforce racism. It helps take the burden of accountability away from white women and places it solely onto women of color.'