In her book,
Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks dives right into her subtopics of race and gender as she wrestles with the concept of "whiteness." Detailing it as the primary root of society's negative forces such as colonization and domination, hooks see whiteness as both her target for her language wrath as well as the obstacle that her view of society needs to get past for equality. And that in turn can open people to the possibility of racial freedom. Later, this concept gets retitled as "racial class conflict," but it's the same issue: hooks focuses on white infrastructure as the reason past life is bad and the paradigm shift that is needed is color-based. Part of the struggle that hooks is working in
Yearning, however, is that everyone wants their sense of opportunity and equality. But from an African American perspective, there's plenty to argue the black person hasn't gotten a fair shake and still is not. Ergo, hooks argument premise.
