There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
Laten we op zoek gaan naar ‘vreugde’ in plaats van naar eerlijk voedsel en schone lucht en een gezondere toekomst op een bewoonbare planeet! Alsof geluk volstaat om ons te beschermen tegen de gevolgen van winst-waanzin.
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
and when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house
We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.
We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
When I dare to be powerful–to use my strength in the service of my vision–then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?
…and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
A choice of pains. That’s what living was all about.
What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.
Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all.
Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be.
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
Love is a word, another kind of open.As the diamond comesinto a knot of flameI am Blackbecause I come from the earth’s insidetake my word for jewelin the open light.
Hatred is a death wish for the hated not a life wish for anything else.
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act write speak be I’ll be sending messages on a ouija board cryptic complaints from the other side.
While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness the weight of that silence will choke us.
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken made verbal and shared even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.
I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960’s, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself – whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. – because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.
Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
It’s a struggle but that’s why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
I can’t really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?