Ain’t I A Woman views the problems of racist and sexist oppression, violence and inequality through the prism of status and identity. It first sets up a mapping between oppressive social relations and the value systems laid out in representation. Thus, the “devaluation of black womanhood” is simultaneously the unequal treatment of black women in social practice, and the representation of black women as inherently inferior: over-sexualised, where the standard of feminine value is held to be sexual purity; dominating and “matriarchal” where it is held to be submissiveness and support for patriarchal masculinity. The terms of the devaluation shift as the overall system of values shifts (hooks tracks this across various contexts, over a lengthy period of time), but the devaluation itself is constant, and perpetuates the inferior status of black women.

With respect to status, then, “devaluation” is placed in a systematic relationship with “valuation”. The problem is not simply that a set of norms has been asserted that does not value different ways of being, but that the very “ways of being” of both the oppressed and the oppressing group have been actively falsified - lied about, but also socially directed, psychically contoured, concretely disfigured - by stereotyping representations. Liberal multiculturalism wishes to suspend norms, to value difference, to give equal credit to every way of being; but such celebration of difference cannot by itself redress this dimension of oppression. We would say: no multiculturalism without iconoclasm. We have hardly begun to know what possible “ways of being” there are.

It should also be borne in mind that for hooks the ultimate aim is not the correction of representations, but social justice. De/valuation, the construction of differentials of status in the domain of representation, is an instrument of power, a means rather than an originating cause of oppression. Economic equality means more than parity of esteem.

With respect to identity, the problem addressed by Ain’t I A Woman is that of the submerged and excluded components of political identifications. Political identification is the process through which the invariants of a group, the ways in which it goes on being itself over time, are established and upheld. It is important to know which invariants are essential to the group’s integrity and survival and which are negotiable or dispensable. But the mechanisms of group bonding and mutual recognition are unreliable as a means of discerning what the group’s essential invariants should be: sympathetic identification on the basis of an assumed “likeness” produces warm feelings of community spirit, but also entrusts the group’s composition and direction to the vicissitudes of a shared stereotype.

There are two dangers here, which hooks’s analysis mercilessly exposes. The first is that of simple exclusion, as in the case of white feminists who insisted on racial segregation within the women’s movement, unable to share a platform or participate in political activity with black women like Sojourner Truth - or Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who stated with admirable clarity the universal basis of the struggle for racial and sexual equality:

Our woman’s movement is a woman’s movement that is led and directed by women for the good of women and men, for the benefit of all humanity, which is more than any one branch or section of it. We want, we ask, the active interest of our men, and, too, we are not drawing the color line; we are women, American women, as intensely interested in all that pertains to us as such as all other American women; we are not alienating or withdrawing, we are only coming to the front, willing to join any others in the same work and cordially inviting and welcoming any others to join us.

Here the focus on “active” and “intense” interest, on “coming to the front”, shows the spirit of militant engagement: the demand for a practical understanding of “all that pertains to us” calls for the widest possible investigation of women’s needs and conditions. The criterion of pertinence is both exact and undiscriminating, and the “cordial” invitation to alliance suggests a political bond based on shared endeavour rather than collective narcissism. Ruffin demonstrates that is impossible to maintain “the color line” among the invariants of a movement faithful to these maxims, regardless of the social anxieties of white suffragists.

The second danger is that a part of the group which is allied to it on the basis of one of its formal invariants - for example, black women who are part of a feminist organisation dedicated to identifying and ending women’s economic and sexual oppression - is submerged within the group’s “sympathetic” identity, which is based around the mutual recognition and shared understanding of a dominant subset of its members, say bourgeois white women. The submerged group is “spoken for”, taken for granted, and ultimately exploited in an opportunistic fashion by the dominant group, which uses the organisation as a means of furthering its interests rather than seriously investigating the conditions of oppression and militating against them. Here hooks is scathing towards both white feminists and black male radicals who insisted that black women defer or mute their concern with what pertained to them, in the interests of maintaining the consistency of a political program they were nevertheless expected to support.

We can see in “identity politics” an attempt to deal with this problem of excluded and submerged identities by demanding equal recognition, equal sympathy, for every identifiable subset of the politically active group. But this is impossible: the mechanisms of group bonding and mutual recognition are invariably directed towards the confabulation of a fictitious “likeness” that can only be sustained, in the face of real social antagonism, through the silencing or subjugation of some part of the group. Furthermore, the enumeration of identifiable subsets is itself a suspect recapitulation of the prerogatives of state bureaucracy, with which it all too often finds itself in alliance. “Recognition” and “sympathy” are simply the wrong tools with which to effect a viable egalitarian political identity, which must be based on formal invariants that are indifferent to the empirical variety of individuals, and unable to be taken hostage by the vagaries of group psychology.