Knowledge and Resistance: Black Women Talk about Racism in the Netherlands and the USA

Abstract

This paper presents cross-cultural data gathered in extensive interviews with black women in the US and in the Netherlands. The main issue concerns relations between knowledge and resistance. More specifically, attention is paid to the contents and structure of black women's knowledge of racism and modes of knowledge acquisition. It is argued that different modes and political contexts of acquisition have an impact on everyday `theories' of racism. For that purpose perceptions of racism based upon a `paternalistic' model of race relations (Netherlands) are compared to perceptions based upon a `conflict' model of race relations (US). These different models imply different perceptions of resistance.