2. Anti-Racist Feminists

In other words, they did not and could not really understand that race and class identities create different reality and experiences in the quality of life, the social status, and the lifestyle of women and how this process works. They saw themselves as oppressed but isolated themselves from other race and class groups and thus had no base by which to compare and test their assumptions of the so-called common/generic experience. They ignored the fact that different women experience different kinds of oppression. Traditional feminist activists and writers acted as teachers of feminist discourse to women of color, as well as judges to decide whether other women's voices should be heard and whose. Hence, there was an exclusion of other groups of women whose experience and oppression were homogenized, ignored and marginalized. Further, bell hooks states that to be oppressed means the absence of choices. Therefore, women who do not have extreme restrictions may not consider themselves as oppressed, and thus think that no women are oppressed, or ignore other areas in which women could be oppressed and discriminated against. White, middle-class, ablist, college-educated, heterosexual, mostly married, feminists did not have as many absences of choices as other groups of women, who were ignored and excluded, and that is why they ignored and did not examine other possible spheres of oppression.