A number of years ago I attended a presentation by a women who worked in inner-city elementary schools. This presentation was of a project she ran with the kids. She’d asked them to draw themselves as they would look if they were a member of a different race. One black student drew a homeless person. When asked why, he explained that he saw white people as having no home, no community, no support network like he did with his family and neighborhood.

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins, when paralleling white and black feminist epistemologies, brings up the idea of a supportive community: “While white women may value the concrete, it is questionable whether white families—particularly middle-class nuclear ones—and white community institutions provide comparable types of support” (212). Later, she says that “white women may have access to a women’s tradition valuing emotion and expressiveness, but few Eurocentric institutions except the family validate this way of knowing” (217). In contrast, “Black families and churches... encourage the expression of Black female power” (217).

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