I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?
How much of this truth can I bear to see and still liveunblinded?How much of this paincan I use?
How are you practicing what you preach—whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?
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 n...
We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile.
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
It's difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue.
Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred...
Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of...
The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as people who can not yet afford to be honest. When they can be they will either blossom into a marvel or sink into decay. What gets me ab...
Some of our finest writers, organizers, artists, and scholars in the 60s as well as today, have been lesbian and gay, and history will bear me out.
It was hard but very strengthening to remember that I could silent my whole life long and then be dead, flat out, and never have said or done what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, because of fear...
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; w...
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.
As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from...
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...
In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
What happens when you narrow your definition to what is convenient, or what is fashionable, or what is expected, is dishonesty by silence.
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians,...