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[22 Oct 2006|08:59am] |
I've been reading more radical feminists (yay). I found this in The Word of a Woman by Robin Morgan. It is a run down of an interveiw between Margaret Mead and James Baldwin.
"At one point, Mead mentioned that some social scientists in the United States had completed a study in which they asked small white boys, would they rather be: little white girls or little black boys? She asked if Baldwin could guess what they answered; he couldn't. Mead said, "They would rather be small black boys," to which Baldwin - whose complex and passionate consciousness about oppression I had admired for years - responded, "How encouraging! It shows that they still have some sense left."
Not only was maleness more important than race (to both the little boys and to Baldwin), but the choice of being little black girls was never even raised as an option."
For those of you who are not crazy book eaters, James Baldwin was an gay African-American author writing in the 60's. Ok, I absolutely loved Giovanni's Room, and ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dragort is in love with his essays. And he thought this about women??? Sigh.
I have to admit that while I had no complaints about Giovanni's Room, Another Country and If Beale Street Could Talk made me very uncomfortable. But still, I thought his sexist portrayals of women in those novels was unintentional. Stupid, naive little me.
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