In our hypothetical case, I would have used my power in a way that prevented red-haired people from being my friend. Oppression occurs when an individual or group of individuals has access to the power to institutionalize limits or constraints on a group of people and chooses to do so. Racism, then, can be conceived as the use of power to institutionalize constraints and limits on a group on the basis of racial classifications. It is really not germane to my point or the issue of her racism. The fact is that Carrie Chapman Catt had power, wielded that power in a way that excluded immigrant women and women of color, and subsequently, was a racist.
Strategy involves the use of power to obtain a goal.
When the women of the suffrage movement were devising strategies to increase their own power, they used the power they already had to limit the participation of non-white and immigrant women. This is racism. It really doesn't matter if Catt and Mary Church Terrell were kissing cousins, Catt still wielded her power in a manner that limited a group of women of color. In doing so, she may have gained passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, but she also reinforced the institutionalized devaluation and marginalization of non-white and immigrant women. Almost every historian, women's studies scholar, civil rights scholar and college student who has taken an introductory women's studies course knows that the abolitionist movement provided a foundation for the suffrage movement.