Arianna Bustos’s Reviews > Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot > Status Update

“Whether their justification is being against abortion or the misguided belief that the racism and sexism espoused by the affirmative action while undermining the very concepts that gave them access to power.”

“I am obligated not only to give back, but to challenge erasure and disrespect where I find it, because the children I am raising an the children who are being raised need to see that they are the inheritors of a proud enduring legacy forged here by the people who were put into chains and the people who broke them.”

“I can bee lay clam to those cultures, because they are not mine, not even if I move into one of the countries that would pop up on a DNA test. That road is closed. That’s okay; there is a way forward. We always go forward.”

“Even now beauty is complicated by class, the quality of hair purchased for a weave, the brand of clothes that can be afforded—these are all marked that signal whether your body has a right to be in the space it is occupying.”

“So it serves no one to feign ignorance of what it means to capitalize on fetishization and exoticism without doing anything to combat the problems most likely to be faced by those who are disadvantaged by these standards.”

“Black women are expected to manage their identities and sexual reputations in order to fit into a mixture of virgin and vixen constructs•

“In all communities, there is a group of youth that rebel against at least some of their community’s values.”

“Work against the cultural memes that render it acceptable to foster the hypersexualization of potential targets based on skin color,gender, expression, or age.”

“Portraying men of color as sexually voracious and preying on innocent white women reinforces a cultural obsession with black on white stranger rape, at the expense of the vastly more common intra-racial acquaintance rape.”