Mel Brooks quote: “Sheriff Bart: Where the white women at?”

“Black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Black Women Writers at Work (1983) by Claudia Tate

“It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.”

William Faulkner book Intruder in the Dust

The opening sentence of the novel, Ch. 1
Intruder in the Dust (1948)

“But where Katherine was a white kitten, Elena was a white tigress.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Awakening

“Regarding the idea that the women’s movement is white and middle class — a fair share of the country is white and middle class.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

The Humanist interview (2012)
Context: Regarding the idea that the women’s movement is white and middle class — a fair share of the country is white and middle class. And certainly, there are racist white women. Certainly, there are sexist black men. All those things are true. But the other thing that’s never said is that black women are much more likely to support feminist issues than white women. It makes sense because they’re much more likely to be on the paid labor force than white women. And if you’ve experienced discrimination for one reason, you’re probably more likely to recognize it for another reason.

“As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“The understanding I had by age thirteen of patriarchal politics created in me expectations of the feminist movement that were quite different from those of young, middle class, white women. When I entered my first women's studies class at Stanford University in the early 1970s, white women were revelling in the joy of being together-to them it was an important, momentous occasion. I had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply. I had not known white women who were ignorant of the impact of race and class on their social status and consciousness (Southern white women often have a more realistic perspective on racism and classism than white women in other areas of the United States.) I did not feel sympathetic to white peers who maintained that I could not expect them to have knowledge of or understand the life experiences of black women. Despite my background (living in racially segregated communities) I knew about the lives of white women, and certainly no white women lived in our neighborhood, attended our schools, or worked in our homes When I participated in feminist groups, I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non-white participants. The condescension they directed at black women was one of the means they employed to remind us that the women's movement was "theirs"-that we were able to participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all, we were needed to legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals. And though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic. Frequently, college-educated black women (even those from poor and working class backgrounds) were dismissed as mere imitators. Our presence in movement activities did not count, as white women were convinced that "real" blackness meant speaking the patois of poor black people, being uneducated, streetwise, and a variety of other stereotypes. If we dared to criticize the movement or to assume responsibility for reshaping feminist ideas and introducing new ideas, our voices were tuned out, dismissed, silenced. We could be heard only if our statements echoed the sentiments of the dominant discourse.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, pp. 11-12.

“The white woman must cohabit with members of the dark races, white men with black women. Thus the white race will disappear, for the mixing of the dark with white means the end of the white man, and our most dangerous enemy will become only a memory.”

Nahum Rabinovitch (1928–2020) Israeli rabbi

originally attributed in 1952 to an "Emanuel" Rabinovitch, who appears to be a fictional creation of Eustace Mullins
Misattributed

“We were all exposed to nothing but white dude fiction, occasionally young white women fiction, and if that’s how you’ve grown up, then that is what is normal.”

N. K. Jemisin (1972) American writer

Interviews
Source: On how she once perceived fiction in “NK Jemisin: 'It’s easier to get a book set in black Africa published if you're white'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/02/nk-jemisin-its-easier-to-get-a-book-set-in-black-africa-published-if-youre-white in The Guardian (2020 May 2)

“Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1955), p. 104.

“Where women are, are arguments and strife.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Canto XLIII, stanza 120 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

“Sheriff Bart: Where the white women at?”

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