Feminists are in love with Charlotte Brontë. Yet the great summation of the travails of Charlotte's Jane Eyre was: "Reader, I married him." Reader, I married the boss. No, listen, that's just not good enough! Charlotte Brontë was a flaming racist. If you want to know where she stands, compare her with her sister, the antiracist Emily Brontë, who said, "I am Heathcliff": I am that man of color, who had been a street urchin. And that's just the beginning of what I think we have to do, not only if we are white, but whoever we are. We have to identify entirely with those with less power than ourselves: not only are we "with them"; we are "them." That way lies power for all of us, the end of the divisions, the end of the hierarchy and the flowering of real diversity and individuality.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Feminists are in love with Charlotte Brontë. Yet the great summation of the travails of Charlotte's Jane Eyre was: "Reader, I married him." Reader, I married the boss. No, listen, that's just not good enough! Charlotte Brontë was a flaming racist. If you want to know where she stands, compare her with her sister, the antiracist Emily Brontë, who said, "I am Heathcliff": I am that man of color, who had been a street urchin. And that's just the beginning of what I think we have to do, not only if we are white, but whoever we are. We have to identify entirely with those with less power than ourselves: not only are we "with them"; we are "them." That way lies power for all of us, the end of the divisions, the end of the hierarchy and the flowering of real diversity and individuality." in the context of "Selma James, "The Challenge of Diversity" (1990) collected in Sex, Race and Class: the Perspective of Winning (2012)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.