Quoted: bell hooks on suppressing WOC's writing

I was disturbed when I read Joanna Russ's book How To Suppress Women's writing, where she continually stressed the importance of literature  by women if color by saying that she did not feel that as a white woman scholar she was in a position to speak about these works. Toward the end of the book, she listed many quotes from works by women of color ostensibly encouraging readers to read these writers, to see their words as important. Yet this gesture disturbed me because it also implied that women of color represent this group whose experiences and whose writing is so removed from that of white women that they cannot address such work critically and analytically. -- bell hooks from Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black 

It never ceases to amaze me that I always manage to find something so completely relevant to modern feminism, especially how feminism is expressed and deconstructed online, in hooks's work from more than two decades ago when the internet was still in its fetal stage. People, particularly those privileged on quite a few axes, refuse to engage out of fear that they're silencing someone else's voice. It becomes less a question of "can the subaltern speak?" than is anyone listening when they do.