RE: Black History Month: Madame CJ Walker
February 16, 2016 at 8:34 am
(This post was last modified: February 16, 2016 at 9:22 am by Regina.)
I don't wholly disagree with you, but I think instead of criticising black people for encouraging assimilation, criticise the system that causes it in the first place. You can't really demonise black people for inventing stuff to "look less black", when they live in a white-dominated society where looking as European as possible brings them privileges. It's a whole system there that we have to critique, not just one individual.
I think considering the context of the time is important as well. This was at the turn of the last Century, slavery hadn't long been abolished, it was a period of high racism when America had the prelude to the KKK and Jim Crow. I don't think at that point it would have been possible for black women to have a fully-fledged natural hair movement, without running into some serious problems for it.
I've just been reading about her, and tbh she did a lot of good work besides that, encouraging entrepeneurship among black women and contributing to NAACP causes. She donated so much money to charitable causes to help black people.
I think considering the context of the time is important as well. This was at the turn of the last Century, slavery hadn't long been abolished, it was a period of high racism when America had the prelude to the KKK and Jim Crow. I don't think at that point it would have been possible for black women to have a fully-fledged natural hair movement, without running into some serious problems for it.
I've just been reading about her, and tbh she did a lot of good work besides that, encouraging entrepeneurship among black women and contributing to NAACP causes. She donated so much money to charitable causes to help black people.
"Adulthood is like looking both ways before you cross the road, and then getting hit by an airplane" - sarcasm_only
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
