"Your blood in our veins"

While railing against the notion of black women's intellectual inferiority, feminist Maria Stewart makes a solid and hard-hitting point:

"...[T]oo much of your blood flows in our veins, too much of your color on our skins, for us not to possess your spirits."

For black women, the issue of sexual abuse remains both a historical (and for some a familial) fact and a modern problem. As we saw (or rather, didn't see) in 'The Help', domestics were subject to many kinds of abuse. The sexual abuse between white employers and domestics is not often portrayed on screen, but dates back to slave days as a reality of life.

This abuse of power naturally lead to different issues, including the social placement of biracial children. For slave women, this would have meant another child under White supremacy. By the mid to late-twentieth century, however, this point of contention could serve as a rallying point for black feminists.

Regardless of the results of sexual abuse against black women, the original statement still makes a very good point. With so much evidence of White leaders 'taking a bit of the other' (if you'll pardon the expression), even the argument of intellectual inferiority among black women is waxing thin by racist standards. It seems like a vicious cycle, this tendency to abuse in order to hold power over a group or individual and then having to battle the consequences when the minority begins to expand to resemble the majority.

The question is, in the quest for an equal and non-racist society, which solution must come first: a solution to end abuse or one for the demolition of bigoted thinking? Can they be separately dealt with or must they fall together?