See me nowyour severed daughterlaughing our name into echoall the world shall remember
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 cho...
The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has n...
If you come as softlyAs wind within the treesYou may hear what I hearSee what sorrow sees.If you come as lightlyAs threading dewI will take you gladlyNor ask more of you.You may sit beside meSilent as...
All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mout...
You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can inc...
When a people share a common oppression, certain kinds of skills and joint defenses are developed. And if you survive you survive because those skills and defenses have worked. When you come into conf...
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away...
Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will fi...
In the 60s, political correctness became not a guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity—...
I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a Black m...
I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threat...
Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions...
As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling...
What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power ove...
There is a timbre of voicethat comes from not being heardand knowing / you are not beingheard / noticed onlyby others / not heardfor the same reason.
The move to render the presence of lesbians and gay men invisible in the intricate fabric of Black existence and survival is a move which contributes to fragmentation and weakness in the Black communi...
The distortion of relationship which says I disagree with you, so I must destroy you leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular vein p...
It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.
I sit before the typewriter and nothing comes. If feels as if underlining these assaults, lining them up one after the other and looking at them squarely might give them an unbearable power. Yet, I kn...