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Over the last decade, theoretical and political crises within North American women's movements and within feminist theory have produced a recognition of the need for more productive dialogue about racist discourses and practices. Several impasses have made addressing this need difficult. Three of these impasses will be discussed here by way of introducing this paper, a paper which occupies a particular position historically and politically due to its relationship to these impasses. These three impasses concern how what Homi K. Bhabha calls “the Other question” should be addressed, whether analyses of racism as a set of economic, cultural, and political arrangements should take precedence over analyses of subjective investments in racism, and who ought to speak to these issues.
With respect to the first impasse, white women have been criticized for failing to address women of color as well as for engaging in other forms of racist discourse. But if, as bell hooks claims, “Black people are not born into this world with innate understanding of racism and white supremacy” (118), then it would be foolish to assume that white people automatically possess such an understanding. As a white, middle-class woman, I find Elizabeth Spelman's analysis of racist discourse an excellent source for understanding how and why racism is so easily reproduced, and not only by whites.1 Learning how to address the “other” requires work.
The second impasse concerns the focus of analysis and probably poses the greatest challenge, rooted as it is in a series of false oppositions between “objective” and “subjective,” social and psychic, institutional and personal. While a systematic analysis of racism (like other major social divisions) obviously requires an understanding of the social, political, and economic processes through which it is produced and maintained, it also requires an understanding of the subjective investments of various social groups in those processes.2 One of the reasons for ne