To borrow your example regarding rape and the sexualization of women, I – as woman – don’t point to ‘men’ and blame them for the structural inequalities still remaining in our political, legal and social institutions and the social framework that perpetuates the subjugation of women. As a woman, I also accept complicity in perpetuating the system. Women themselves are often just as complicit as men in proliferating stereotypes and – whether advertently or not – allow the system to maintain itself. This is one of the problems I have with some of the rhetoric in certain feminist literature. It posits men as ‘the other’ and women as on the defensive in an ‘us against them’ framework. I do believe that men need to acknowledge their complicity, but women must also do so. I believe we must acknowledge that we are all complicit, and recognize that this complicity is what unites us and that we must work together to institute change.

I don’t mean to say that African Americans are in some way responsible for or the cause of white supremacy, or that they are refusing to acknowledge their role in the system, or that they uniformly demonize white people. I only argue that privilege and focus should be placed on what unites us as individuals all living under the same structurally unequal system and that we all have an interest in dismantling it. Living within a ‘white supremacist’ society and with social racism is destructive and to the detriment of all races. I think that if we abandon racial distinctions and classifications that have historically been used and continue to be used by political forces to perpetuate difference and 'otherness' and cloud or distort the similarities that unite us, we will all be better off.