Some part of this text we are about to make is already written … that I am a Black woman speaking to a largely white audience is a major construction of the text. blackness [sic] and ‘whiteness’ structure and mediate our interchanges - verbal, physical, sensual, political - they mediate them so that there are some things that I will say to you and something that I won’t. And quite possibly the most important things will be the ones that I withhold. The racialised power relations that we live determine what I will say and how I will approach my saying it. Our relative positionings within the society are at the core of these determinations. Notions of voice, representation, theme, style, imagination are charged with these historical locations and require vigorous examination rather than liberal assumptions of universal subjectivity or the downright denial of such locations. Even if my audience were half Black, or three-quarters Black, even if it were fully Black or people of colour, blackness and ‘whiteness’ - racial identities - would still mediate our conversation, though in such circumstances I might become a little more revealing. In such circumstances so much time wouldn’t be wasted in convincing white people their ‘ruling’ culture firstly, exists, secondly, was and is violently invasive and hegemonic and rationalises all others it meets into subordinated categories. That is, we might and in full cognizance of those circumstances proceed beyond white ignorance, white denial, white fear, white apathy, white lies, white power disguised as concern for censorship. Whites, that is, might proceed into the dangerous territory of knowing, instead of engaging in the sleight of hand that Michelle Wallace calls “the production of knowledge (that) is constantly employed in reinforcing intellectual racism.
[ellipses hers]

- Brand, Dionne. “Whose Gaze and Who Speaks for Whom.” Bread out of Stone. Coach House Press: Toronto: 1994. 152-3.