most average braud

1. bell hooks

“…the logic of white supremacy would be radically undermined if everyone would learn to identify with and love blackness.”

It is much more acceptable nowadays, and even fashionable, to call for an interrogation of the meaning and significance of “whiteness” in contemporary critical discussions of race. While Cone’s analysis was sometimes limited by a discourse that invested in binary oppositions (refusing to cut white folks any slack), the significant critical intervention that he made was the insistence that the logic of white supremacy would be radically undermined if everyone would learn to identify with and love blackness.

Cone was not evoking the notion of racial erasure, that is, the sentimental idea (often voiced by religious folks) that racism would cease to exist if everyone would just forget about race and just see each other as human beings who are the same. Instead he insisted that the politics of racial domination have necessarily created a black reality that is distinctly different from that of whites, and from that· location has emerged a distinct black culture. His prophetic call was for whites to learn how to identify with that difference-to see it as a basis for solidarity.