Family Affairs

On Friday, I presented the poem "Family Affairs" by Maya Angelou (it's on page  of the anthology). I think we had a very good discussion of the black and white feminist movements and their relationship as explored in this poem.
There are some very different themes in the two movements, I think. The poem points out that white feminists complain about being put on a pedestal and locked in a very high tower. While these are legitimate complaints, they don't really compare with the history of hardship that African American feminists have to deal with. Like, flowing golden hair kinda sucks if everybody's pulling on it and that's your defining feature, but would you rather be dragged by dusty braids to a foreign country and enslaved?
Anyway, we pretty much covered all that in class, and I agree with it, but I think there's another aspect to this poem that I really wanted to get to and we didn't go into a whole lot of depth on. To me, it seems like Angelou isn't just pointing out the differences in the movements, she is actually explaining why they should be kept separate. She rejects the white character's aspirations to sisterhood. She does say she needs more time, implying that maybe one day she could accept this gesture, and that's what people in class focused on. This might be what Angelou intended, but when I first read it, the tone in my head was a little more critical, as if trying to act as though they could be sisters was offensive because they were in such different positions.
Stepping down from one's pedestal seems noble, but the poem credits it to fear of vertigo rather than genuine concern for the black character.
In my mind the message was closer to "Back off please, you don't get it," than "maybe one day our causes will be similar enough to work together".
Like Iulianna said in class, it's similar to the critique of Mary in Native Son. It also reminded me of the naively liberal teacher in White Boy Shuffle with the "human" shirt, advocating for colorblindness. The ridicule with which Gunnar treated that lesson surprised me some, as did Bigger's hatred of Mary. It's been a less intuitive idea to me than some of the others in this class: that privileged people striving for equality could be insulting. Like, what position would Gunnar rather see his teacher take? One supporting diversity, perhaps, but there's a fine line between maintaining diversity and the separation of races, which seems... problematic. What do you guys think? Can the white woman in the poem be criticized for her actions if it was never her, but her ancestors who resided happily in that tower for so many years(/is that what Angelou is saying)? Is she leaving her tower for her own sake?