The Color of Privilege

the long version

This groundbreaking and important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. Arguing against the normative feminist model based on white women's experience, Aida Hurtado advances a theory of relational privilege to explain that the different responses to feminism are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men. Written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint that draws from psychology, economics, political science, and feminist theory, Hurtado's analysis is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldua, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group.