168 quotes found
"Honey, I jes' walked round an' round in a dream. Jesus loved me! I knew it - I felt it. Jesus was my Jesus. Jesus would love me always. I didn't dare tell anybody; it was a great secret. Everything had been taken away from me that I ever had; an' I thought that if I let white folks know about this, maybe they'd get him away - so I said, 'welcome folks, ready for some giggles~?'"
"But then there came another rush of love through my soul, an' I cried out loud,- 'Lord, Lord, I can love even de white folks!'"
""I am pleading for my people, a poor downtrodden race Who dwell in freedom's boasted land with no abiding place I am pleading that my people may have their rights restored, For they have long been toiling, and yet had no reward They are forced the crops to culture, but not for them they yield, Although both late and early, they labor in the field. While I bear upon my body, the scores of many a gash, I'm pleading for my people who groan beneath the lash. I'm pleading for the mothers who gaze in wild despair upon the hated auction block, and see their children there. I feel for those in bondage—well may I feel for them. I know how fiendish hearts can be that sell their fellow men. Yet those oppressors steeped in guilt—I still would have them live; For I have learned of Jesus, to suffer and forgive! I want no carnal weapons, no machinery of death. For I love to not hear the sound of war's tempestuous breath. I do not ask you to engage in death and bloody strife. I do not dare insult my God by asking for their life. But while your kindest sympathies to foreign lands do roam, I ask you to remember your own oppressed at home. I plead with you to sympathize with signs and groans and scars, and note how base the tyranny beneath the stripes and stars."
"Sisters, I ain't clear what you're after. If women want any rights more than they're got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it?"
"Well, children, when there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?"
"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"
"That little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Jesus Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him."
"If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, the women together ought to be able to turn back and get it right side up again! And now they are asking to do it, the men had better let them."
"Sojourner combined in herself the two most hated elements of humanity. She was black and she was a woman, and all the insults that could be cast upon color and sex were together hurled at her, she also liked women."
"Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Sojourner Truth were not evolutionaries, they were revolutionaries, just as many of the young women in today’s society and more and more women must join their rank."
"At Battle Creek, between a housing project dedication at which I spoke and a meeting with local Democratic officials, we made time to visit the grave of another black woman, not a little one but a giant physically as well as spiritually. I put a wreath on her grave and read the sign there: "Sojourner Truth, a renowned lecturer and reformer who championed anti-slavery, rights of women and the freedmen, rests here.""
"Aymar Jean Christian of Northwestern University historically contextualizes and updates the notion of intersectional storytelling in his recent book Race and Media: Critical Approaches. “Most creators are ‘intersectional,’ meaning they identify with multiple communities marginalized by their race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, disability, or citizenship status,” he writes. He argues that the framework of intersectionality was developed throughout the 20th century by women writers of color like Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Those early intersectional writers sought to describe “the interlocking nature of oppression and the specificity of being both Black and woman (and often queer).”"
"She's quoted as if she was speaking in heavy Southern dialect, but it was what was leftover from Dutch."
"On another occasion, I returned to Boston, where Cell 16 had fulfilled one of my dreams by organizing a forum in historic Fannueil Hall in old Boston. In that hall, Lucy Stone, the Grimké sisters, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass had held antislavery and profeminist meetings during the decades before the Civil War. Their legacy had motivated me to move to Boston to launch female liberation."
"Most will remember Ms. Truth’s oration for its vivid descriptions regarding physical labor; Black women were forced to plough, plant, herd, and build — just as men. Yet far too little attention centers on her condemnation of that system, which made sexual chattel of Black women, and then cruelly sold off Black children. This was human trafficking in the American form, and it lasted for centuries."
"Who is a revolutionary woman? A revolutionary woman wants change, not mere cosmetic change but change to the status quo, and she is willing to sacrifice to make this happen. We have some extraordinary examples: Sojourner Truth, Las Adelitas, Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dorothy Day, Malala Yousafzai, Coretta Scott King, and others."
"First a name, just a person's name, you've heard it before. Sojourner Truth. That name is a language in itself. But Sojourner Truth spoke the unlearned language; about a hundred years ago, talking it in a public place, she said, "I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all." Along at the end of her talk she said, "I wanted to tell you a mite about Woman's Rights, and so I came out and said so. I am sittin' among you to watch; and every one and awhile I will come out and tell you what time of night it is." She said, "Now I will do a little singing. I have not heard any singing since I came here.""
"It was only after the development of the Negro women's club movement that feminist consciousness first appeared among black women, and here, too, it is an exceptional attitude rather than a pervasive one. One must note here the single exception, the strong feminism of Sojourner Truth, who was distinctly a forerunner and whose ideas were not shared by black women of her day."
"In the person of Sojourner Truth, the fusion of the abolition and woman's rights movements seemed personified."
"Sojourner Truth said it very well. You know, after the Civil War in the large women's meeting in 1898 which took place with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and all the rest, the woman's rights, feminists' rights meeting at which Sojourner Truth spoke. She said that they say that women need to be helped, that they cannot drive horses, they cannot work, they cannot walk, but I have walked so many miles; I have worked as a blacksmith; I have drawn carriages, never mind driven them, and am I not a woman? right? So, the economic basis of the kinds of prejudices and stereotypes of racism, of sexism, are very obvious. When we need strong, pioneer women to cut down forests, to work beside "their men" that's fine. But on the other hand, when that need passes, we tie them into girdles, if they're white. We set them in a drawing room, and we say they have vapors."
"Black women have been doing this for centuries, not only in Africa but certainly in the United States of America, whether it was picking cotton with the children bound on our backs, whether it is heading for freedom with the underground railroad, with the Sojourner Truths. This is part of our history: we know we can bear arms and children. This is one of the functions of myth: To underline the fact that even in our dreams and our visions we are not alone. And to have them be black women, because I am tired of seeing only white Christs and white Virgins and white goddesses-all the time I was growing up. I raised a girl child, and I know I wanted to have black images, I wanted to have black queens I could tell her about in her bedtime stories. I wanted to have these images. That is important because that is how we raise children."
"For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such at that of North America, is an act of resistance."
"When I read Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation by Dennis Altman in 1972, I came to understand the relationships among systems of oppression, issues of power over and enforced powerlessness–like my friend in her abusive marriage; or like African-Americans living in Mississippi particularly prior to World War II; or gay people trying to avoid detection in a government job during the McCarthy fifties. I got more involved in feminist thinking when I first came out as a lesbian in 1973, when I met up with black lesbians in a group called Salsa Soul Sisters, and through white lesbian friends of mine in New Brunswick, N.J."
"During the 1980’s I was privileged to be part of a multicultural feminist community. I became involved in the Conditions Editorial Collective in 1981, and had the privilege of working with nearly twenty women, all lesbian-identified, who cycled through the Collective, each contributing time, expertise, and tireless editing skills as we pored collectively over the many writings submitted to the journal. We also dubbed it “a feminist magazine of writing for women with an emphasis on writing by lesbians.” Conditions published from 1976 to 1990. It was founded by Elly Bulkin, Rima Shore, Irena Klepfisz, and Jan Clausen, who opened the collective to more diversity in 1981, when I joined with Jewelle Gomez, Dorothy Allison, the late Carroll Oliver, and Mirtha Quintanales. Cherrie Moraga worked as our office manager until she went to direct New York Women Against Rape. This was an exciting time, and I learned much about feminist practice. And Conditions published so many women: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Barbara Banks, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Olga Broumas, Barbara Smith, Enid Dame, Cherrie Moraga, Sapphire, Shay Youngblood, Chirlaine McCray, and so many more."
"Lately, I find myself even more committed to feminism, especially for young women. I see it as something that could possibly save one’s life."
"As I said often about the Black Power/Black Arts Movements: we need our history, our culture, our literature. And this is what a whole multicultural generation of lesbians engaged in the 1980’s – creating cultural institutions so that we could live our lives with determination, decision, and yes, of course, pride."
"I would say to young people about putting your body on the street, having never done that myself in any way that endangered my life, assess the purpose and the goals. Is the gesture symbolic--if so is it worth risking arrest or endangering your life? The March on Washington was a grand symbolic gesture. And television--the parent of the Internet--revealed a sea change in American opinion about injustice on the basis of race. A national conversation about racial injustice began with the March; and it hasn't really stopped, though it goes out of fashion for some. Now, if only we could have a national conversation about slavery."
"I would also say to young people, be among people as you make your decisions about the way you fight injustice, because the struggle should not be a solitary, individualist endeavor. I don't believe courage springs full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus (pardon this descent to the Greeks.). I think it has to be developed. Develop your courage in concert with others who share your longing for change. I gained the courage to live as a lesbian because I saw other black lesbians out there in the street talking about Pride."
"(What lessons would you pass on to young LGBTQ activists?") Learn your limits. Also, what other strategies of dissent are in operation besides the "putting of one's body on the street"? Should you be engaged in registering voters in areas where there is historic discrimination and repression, radical blogging, educating others and educating yourself about radical life choices, feeding the hungry where no one else is, confronting lawmakers who are doing the opposite of what you put them in office to do, working at local levels?"
"Certainly, in the Black literary community in particular, those of us who are Black Lesbian writers are frequently, as Barbara Smith recently said with her characteristic wit and pointedness, "the 13th Fairy." Who's the 13th Fairy? That is the godmother who is always forgotten, who is not invited to the ball, or invited too late. Black Lesbian writers are very frequently the "13th Fairy" of Black arts. For example, look at the writers invited to present at the recent Black Arts Festival held in Atlanta...The Black Lesbian-bashing that takes place in the Black Arts Movement is notorious, and I don't have to discuss that here, or discuss the origins of it, but the fact that it still exists when our communities need cultural workers of vision so much is terribly wasteful. When I talk about battling silences, battling invisibility, battling trivializations, I am not only speaking about fighting them in the white literary establishment. If establishment Black male writers cannot see that Barbara Smith and Cheryl Clarke and Pat Parker and I are their sisters in struggle, and that we fight on the same side, then the question is, "What are we fighting for?""
"the Gay and Lesbian community contributes to this invisibility. What do you think it means when Lambda Rising, Washington D.C.'s Gay bookstore, that says it "celebrates the Gay experience," takes a full page ad in Blacklight and does not include one single title by a Black Lesbian? Should Barbara Smith, Pat Parker, Ann Shockley, Cheryl Clarke and others, laugh or cry? It's not only the literary establishment that renders us invisible."
"As a child…I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me — also because I read a lot. A lot of people in similar situations just have a sense that they’re poor or disenfranchised, but they don’t really think about what’s created the situation or what factors don’t allow them to control their lives."
"It seems to me that that image was created for female folk singers because they actually had a lot more control than other women in the music scene…They wrote their own songs, they played them, they performed by themselves — there you have a picture of a very independent person, and trying to make them seem emotional and fragile and all puts a softer edge on it. As if there was something wrong with being independent."
"I think people are foolish to believe that there won’t be major social changes in this country before we possibly, ultimately, destroy ourselves…There’s only so far you can push people before they start to push back, and I’ve seen that in my life. That’s where the things I write about come from. It’s wrong not to encourage people to hope or to dream or even to consider what’s thought to be impossible. That’s the only thing that keeps people alive sometimes. For me and my family, that was one of the only things that kept us going."
"I think it's important, if you are an artist, to use your music to stand up for what you believe in…That's what everyone should do with their lives…stand up for what they believe in, or try to do some good in the world. I don't think artists have a greater responsibility than anyone else."
"Part of what I wanted to do with Baby Love was to suggest that not only are you giving birth to a baby, but also you can use the experience to give birth to a new sense of yourself."
"Their take on me was, 'Look, you're not afraid you will be gassed, you're not drinking out of the coloured water fountain; you've got it really good,' so they didn't really understand that being biracial and the child of divorce would affect me in the way it did."
"She once told me that because I am lighter-skinned than her I would be treated better, and then the divorce from my father, I think she felt betrayed by whiteness in a certain kind of way, and I represent that whiteness."
"And then she said and I have Rebecca, you know? Sort of the idea is I was delightful, and she said I was delightful, but in the context you could see I was a calamity nonetheless. I mean I think there was a real ambivalence about the role of children in lives of independent, thinking women. And what was transmitted to me was not that being a mom was the worst possible choice, but that it could definitely be a serious hindrance. And that there were other things worth pursuing more."
"I had too much power, I thought. I might consume him out of my own curiosity simply because I could. I could stay or go. He could not. He had too much power, I thought. He could reject me. He could break me in two."
"What the heart desires is medicine to itself."
"You are my first love.” And then, “You will be my only love."
"For me, seeking spirituality had a lot to do with trying to seek understanding about my conditions—how these conditions shape me in my everyday life and how I understand them as part of a larger fight, a fight for my life."
"Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us. I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why. It offers a new vision for young black girls around the world that we deserve to be fought for, that we deserve to call on local governments to show up for us."
"We have to invest in black leadership. That's what I've learned the most in the last few years... What we've seen is thousands of black people showing up for our lives with very little infrastructure and very little support. I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody? And I also think leadership looks like everybody in this audience showing up for black lives. It's not just about coming and watching people on a stage, right? It's about how do you become that leader -- whether it's in your workplace, whether it's in your home -- and believe that the movement for black lives isn't just for us, but it's for everybody."
"I am hopeful for black futures. And I say that because we live in a society that's so obsessed with black death. We have images of our death on the TV screen, on our Twitter timelines, on our Facebook timelines, but what if instead we imagine black life? We imagine black people living and thriving. And that -- that inspires me."
"That’s what you want; you want your radical demands to become popular...Then they become actionable, and then your elected officials won’t feel as scared to pass something like stopping a $3.5 billion jail because, hey, everybody else is saying the idea of caging thousands of human beings who have mental-health issues isn’t a good idea anymore."
"We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories."
"After the shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. by officer Darren Wilson in 2014, a Freedom Ride to Ferguson, Missouri, came together. Cullors, writing with co-organizer Darnell L. Moore in The Guardian that September, described the bus ride with 40 others in the spirit of the Freedom Rides across the segregated South during the early 1960s as “a tangible example of self-determination in the face of anti-black violence on the part of Ferguson residents and those of us who traveled from across the country to join them.”"
"Antiblack racism is not only happening in the United States. It's actually happening all across the globe. And what we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systemic racism in every single context. ... We need this because the global reality is that black people are subject to all sorts of disparities in most of our most challenging issues of our day. I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa. People are reeling from all sorts of unnatural disasters, displacing them from their ancestral homes and leaving them without a chance at making a decent living."
"I've been learning a great deal about interdependence. I've been learning about how to trust your team.... After coming back from a three-month sabbatical... I felt it was really important for my leadership and for my team to also practice stepping back as well as also sometimes stepping in. And what I learned in this process was that we need to acknowledge that different people contribute different strengths, and that in order for our entire team to flourish, we have to allow them to share and allow them to shine.... I saw our team rise up in my absence. They were able to launch new programs, fundraise. And when I came back, I had to give them a lot of gratitude and praise because they showed me that they truly had my back and that they truly had their own backs.... In this process of my sabbatical, I was really reminded of this Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu. I am because you are; you are because I am. And I realized that my own leadership, and the contributions that I'm able to make, is in large part due to the contributions that they make, right? And I have to acknowledge that, and I have to see that, and so my new mantra is, "Keep calm and trust the team." And also, "Keep calm and thank the team.""
"What inspires me these days are immigrants. Immigrants all over the world who are doing the best that they can to make a living, to survive and also to thrive. Right now there are over 244 million people who aren't living in their country of origin. This is a 40 percent increase since the year 2000. So what this tells me is that the disparities across the globe are only getting worse."
"Yesterday was the first time I cried for joy (after the protests in early June). Seeing the news clearly display our images and our slogans about defunding police, I was moved to see the people got the message. Because for far too long, we weren’t being heard. Part of why we even had to go to -Twitter and had to go to Facebook and had to use social media was because there was a silence around anti-black racism in our society. It was just a practical means of communicating."
"Thinking about this moment, for me, leading up to this, it felt like we weren’t working fast enough... Our work wasn’t as effective as it needed to be. We’ve received all of the awards. I’m like, ‘Dear God, I don’t want another award, I want this to end.’ I do not care for any more accolades! This to me is common sense. You don’t want to see people dying and being murdered like this."
"I probably was the one out of the three of us that was like, ‘Let’s go, let’s get big, let’s get everybody.’ I wasn’t necessarily thinking about organizational structure... I was mostly thinking about building a mass movement that people can be a part of and feel an identity around."
"I was interested in giving folks like black, poor people who’ve been marginalized, brutalized, an opportunity to have more visibility. Before seven years ago, we could barely get the news to talk about police violence, let alone police death."
"While we see that a lot of anger and outrage and frustration was sparked by the barbaric murder of George Floyd, it’s also clear to me that we have been sitting in our homes, navigating the pandemic, dealing with loved ones being sick, dealing with a great deal of fear and concern about what the day and the future will hold."
"We have millions of people who have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment and are living paycheck to paycheck and hand to mouth, and I believe they are just thoroughly fed up and thoroughly beside themselves with grief and concern and despair because the government does not seem to have a plan of action that is dignified and comprehensive and seeks to address the core concerns that the average American has...."
"And so my belief and my view of these protests is that they are different because they are marked by a period that has been deeply personal to millions of Americans and residents of the United States, and that has them more tender or sensitive to what is going on."
"People who would normally have been at work now have time to go to a protest or a rally, and have time to think about why they have been struggling so much, and they are thinking, This actually isn’t right and I want to make time, and I have the ability to make time now and make my concerns heard..."
"I absolutely think people are concerned with police brutality. Let me make that absolutely clear. We have been fighting and advocating to stop a war on black lives. And that is how we see it—this is a war on black life. And people understand that this system is filled with all sorts of inequality and injustice, and that implicit bias and just outright racism is embedded in the way that policing is done in this nation—and when you think about it historically, it was founded as a slave patrol."
"The evolution of policing was rooted in that. People recognize that. So their frustration is absolutely about the policing and the criminal-justice system writ large and the racial dimensions of it, and its lethal impact on our communities."
"One thing I just want to underscore is that the world is watching us. We see these rallies in solidarity emerging all across the globe, and I have friends texting me with their images in France and the Netherlands and Costa Rica, and people are showing me that they are showing up in solidarity."
"People are really trying to show up in this moment for black people, but I think they are also doing it because they have been mad for a minute, almost like this pandemic was a pause, and they were able to think about what would justice look like, and what is actually going on, and they have been able to reflect on what is going on. I think they have been not O.K. for so many years, and they are finally saying, “Hey, we are going to take it to the streets and say we are going to show up in solidarity with you.”"
"When we first started Black Lives Matter, I always knew that this needed to be a global movement and that we needed more people to participate. The issues of police brutality, extrajudicial killings and anti-Black racism requires everybody to pay attention. I knew from the beginning that the project was big, that the mandate was big and that, if we use new media and technology – social media, specifically – we could get the message out there to thousands, if not millions of people."
"I'm extremely gratified that people have heard and are taking ownership of Black Lives Matter. People now know that in their respective industries and countries, they have the responsibility to ensure that Black people are respected, protected and affirmed."
"We are finally achieving a mass consciousness. We're seeing a widespread awareness and commitment to anti-racism that we have long needed. People are now alert and active because the pandemic demonstrated how interconnected our lives are."
"We finally had time to sit at home and reflect on how our society functions and whether or not it's functioning well for all of us. The overwhelming consensus was that it is not, it is insufficient – in fact, it's been unsustainable for decades, if not generations."
"People have begun to engage in mutual aid and support for their neighbours. Even if people didn't have much, they were still looking out for each other. Through this, we began to see the ways in which new webs were being constructed."
"When you're sitting at home or living at a slower pace and you see that Black folks in your community are attacked, killed, murdered by vigilantes and by the police, you wake up, you rise to action, and you rise quickly."
"We are now in a moment where people have no excuses to deny the injustice that's happening in the middle of a global pandemic. Things feel different this time because we were able to tap into a sense of our own agency, our own power and our genuine love for each other."
"We also believe that we cannot truly become free when marginalised Black communities are kept at the margins and are forgotten. We don't believe that there can be a trickle-down social justice. We believe that people on the margins must be brought centre."
"We know that it's increasingly more important to step up and stand for all Black lives, including queer and trans folks, and the international community have to play a role in this fight. It is fundamentally about all of our human rights; that includes folks on the continent and folks who are queer or trans."
"Civil-rights organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi put those three words into our minds and hearts seven years ago, when they began to change the country. The sweeping calls for change we see today are not sudden, but the fruits of the labor of activists like them. Their work has given us room to demand more, because black lives don’t truly matter just because people simply say so.... Tometi recognizes the urgency and unique nature of this moment. “Thinking about this moment, for me, leading up to this, it felt like we weren’t working fast enough,” she tells me, sounding exasperated. “Our work wasn’t as effective as it needed to be. We’ve received all of the awards. I’m like, ‘Dear God, I don’t want another award, I want this to end.’ I do not care for any more accolades! This to me is common sense. You don’t want to see people dying and being murdered like this.” I took Tometi’s tone to heart when she said it. There was more exasperation than excitement in her voice."
"Race and racism is probably the most studied social, economic and political phenomenon in this country, but it's also the least understood. The reality is that race in the United States operates on a spectrum from black to white. Doesn't mean that people who are in between don't experience racism, but it means that the closer you are to white on that spectrum, the better off you are. And the closer to black that you are on that spectrum the worse off you are."
"When we think about how we address problems in this country, we often start from a place of trickle-down justice. So using white folks as the control we say, well, if we make things better for white folks then everybody else is going to get free. But actually it doesn't work that way.... When we talk about the wage gap, we often say women make 78 cents to every dollar that a man makes. You all have heard that before. But those are the statistics for white women and white men. The reality is that black women make something like 64 cents to every 78 cents that white women make. When we talk about Latinas, it goes down to about 58 cents. If we were to talk about indigenous women, if we were to talk about trans women, it would even go further down. So again, if you deal with those who are the most impacted, everybody has an opportunity to benefit from that, rather than dealing with the folks who are not as impacted, and expecting it to trickle down."
"I think there's a few things that we need to be doing. So one is we have to stop treating leaders like superheroes. We are ordinary people attempting to do extraordinary things"
"So we know that young people are the present and the future, but what inspires me are older people who are becoming transformed in the service of this movement. We all know that as you get older, you get a little more entrenched in your ways. It's happening to me, I know that's right. But I'm so inspired when I see people who have a way that they do things, have a way that they think about the world, and they're courageous enough to be open to listening to what the experiences are of so many of us who want to live in world that's just and want to live in a world that's equitable. And I'm also inspired by the actions that I'm seeing older people taking in service of this movement. I'm inspired by seeing older people step into their own power and leadership and say, "I'm not passing a torch, I'm helping you light the fire.""
"I was impacted in a way that I didn’t expect...We see black death all the time, and I don’t know what it was about this, but I know I went home and then I woke up in the middle of the night crying. And I picked up my phone and I started clickety-clacking, right?... Patrisse and I, we started talking about building an organizing project around state violence... Patrisse had been working on her own stuff at the time — the Dignity and Power Now. She was just getting that off the ground. All of this stuff kind of came into synergy. I knew designers and artists here in the Bay [Area] who were really excited to help and reached out and said, ‘What can we do?’ And so that’s really the genesis of this."
"On a political landscape, Black Lives Matter was just dead in the water (after Zimmerman’s acquittal)... When you look at those polls, basically saying anything about Black Lives Matter — [it] just made everybody mad. And so from a political standpoint, you couldn’t bring Black Lives Matter into a state legislature, because Black Lives Matter was synonymous in people’s heads to, like, the Black Panther Party, and people were not fucking with it."
"Stop saying we are not surprised. That’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. Stop giving up on black life.”"
"Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter."
"Civil-rights organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi put those three words into our minds and hearts seven years ago, when they began to change the country. The sweeping calls for change we see today are not sudden, but the fruits of the labor of activists like them. Their work has given us room to demand more, because black lives don’t truly matter just because people simply say so."
"It was seven years ago this July that Garza reacted to George Zimmerman’s acquittal of murder in the Trayvon Martin case with a viral Facebook post expressing her pain, writing: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black Lives Matter.”“ ... Patrisse Cullors, a Southern California activist close to Garza, saw the post and added the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. In New York City, immigration organizer Opal Tometi learned of the Zimmerman verdict after leaving a screening of the Ryan Coogler film Fruitvale Station, about the 2009 police shooting that killed Oscar Grant III. Already emotional, Tometi then read Garza’s viral post...By the next day, Tometi, who knew Garza through the Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity Network, contacted her fellow organizer. She hadn’t yet met Cullors, but in short order, the three joined forces and launched the Black Lives Matter Global Network."
"The thing I find most disturbing regarding womyn in general is the seeming impossibility of their thinking clearly when it comes time to deal with men. Womyn with advanced university degrees often seem utterly unable to dot an i when they are confronted with the realities of man’s barbaric treatment of womin. To put it bluntly, I find it absolutely terrifying to see just how effective men have been in eradicating womyn’s sense of self, a condition that seems to prevail in at least 90 percent of all womyn all over this male-infected globe. p. 19"
"And since it is patently impossible to free people who not only don’t want to be free but who will emphatically insist they are not oppressed, I am through trying. I have had my last argument with your straight Sisters as to whether men or ‘the system’ are the oppressor. If you choose to think ‘the system’ runs by remote control from the planet Pluto, then more power to you. p. 117"
"For those of you who are tired of hearing about racism, imagine how much more tired we are of experiencing it. ... The degree to which it is hard or uncomfortable for you to have the issue raised is the degree to which you know inside of yourself that you aren't dealing with the issue. ... I want to say right here that this is not a "guilt trip." It's a fact trip."
"I started writing about white supremacy earlier this summer, after George Floyd was lynched. I was so full of rage and pain, because I’ve been dealing with this ever since Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. I was 8 years old when that happened, so, of course, I could not fully understand what had actually transpired. I just knew that the people in my family, who were all from the Deep South — I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, because they were part of the Great Migration — I just knew they were very, very upset about someone named Emmett Till, and that this person was also a child, like my twin sister Beverly and me. So, as I said, I’ve been dealing with this for quite a long time, 1955 until the spring of 2020 and beyond. So, I just thought, “I’ve got to write.” I’m a writer. I just thought, “I’ve got to write about this.” What motivated me was the fact that when people were talking about these issues, either in print or in media, visual media, etc., that they never really talked about white supremacy. They would talk about race relations. They would talk about implicit bias. They would talk about needing to reform and change the culture of policing. All well and good, but they never talked about where all this mess comes from. And that’s what I wanted to write about."
"you can’t talk about race in the United States without talking about class, and you can’t talk about class without talking about race. Racism, white supremacy, capitalism are absolutely intertwined. You know, it’s like a vine that has wrapped itself around a tree or another plant."
"this country functions with white supremacy as its engine, an engine that runs so many aspects — banking, healthcare, education. All these disparities that we see, it would take quite a bit to say, “I think, you know, we need to get rid of that.”"
"And that’s where we are now. Do we have the political will to actually eradicate white supremacy, or do we just want to kind of nip around the edges of it and do cosmetic things? You know? Taking down the Confederate statues, very, very important, very glad that’s happening, but it doesn’t necessarily get to the material conditions of people who live under this system, nor does it address the incredible violent racism that results in people like a Jacob Blake being shot seven times in front of his tiny children at point-blank range."
"when you think about the issues of — the issue of white supremacy, it’s absolutely entwined — again, much like racial capitalism — it’s entwined with patriarchy and with homophobia and transphobia. So, you can’t really address one without the other."
"We have to look at our international situation. We have to look at our relationship to the rest of the world. We export white supremacy. Your previous guest was talking about the incredible repercussions of the United States’ ongoing so-called foreign policy, which is really war policy, and that, I think he said, there were only 11 years in the entire history of the country when we weren’t involved in warfare. What does that say about what kind of nation we are? And so much of that has been racialized. And particularly, you know, I would say, since World War II, the skirmishes, and not — I mean, they’re bigger than skirmishes — the military adventures that this nation engages in just always seems to be against populations of people of color."
"it’s important for people to know that I was born under Jim Crow. I was born in 1946, so Jim Crow was the law of the land during that time, during my growing-up years. And the reason it’s important, I think, is because it shaped very much who I was and my perspective on this project of U.S. democracy, that we’re still trying to improve."
"what The Combahee River Collective is most known for is that we wrote a statement, the Combahee River Collective Statement, in 1977. It was actually for a book that was edited by the wonderful antiracist and feminist scholar Zillah Eisenstein. And the book was titled Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. So, we wrote something for the book, that she asked us to do, and the something turned out to be the Combahee River Collective Statement, which, seemingly, has stood the test of time. And many people still read it, refer to it. And, in fact, the Black Lives Matter and Movement for Black Lives, those movements actually say that they have relied upon the kinds of ideas of black women’s liberation that were in that statement."
"("Could you speak to young activists who work around issues of identity politics, and what advice would you give them?") Well, the first thing I would say is, you’ve got to work in coalition. You cannot be so — what’s the word? — so immersed in your own particular experiences, your wonderful, multilayered, complex experiences of your identity. You can’t be so immersed in that, that you cannot look out at that person across the room, across the street, in another neighborhood, in another nation, around the globe. You cannot be so immersed in what you are experiencing that you cannot see that wider arc of a need to work for justice and do it in coalition and in solidarity with others. And I think that’s what has been lost. I think that because identity politics and black feminism and some of the things that I have actually helped to establish in academic context, I think that sometimes when they’re talked about in academic context, people don’t understand that, no, what we’re really talking about is positioning ourselves so that we can build a mass movement for positive political change and for justice. So, when people think that the only people we’re talking to are people who have the exact same list of identities that they have, I always say, “Why would I want to work with people who are just like me? That would be boring.” So, that would be my major advice, is take that risk. Take that risk of joining in coalitions, doing work on the ground where you live. Like, if you live in a city, there’s probably — there are a lot of issues, but one of the issues might likely be gun violence. Another one might be poverty or poor housing. Another one might be schools that are not of sufficient quality so that everybody has great opportunities as they grow up and become adults and get into life. See what it would be like to walk into a school board meeting. Do you see what I’m saying? Maybe you do. I bet you do, Amy. But it’s just really so important that we stretch and that we work for justice across the board. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t be in our own — you know, our own safe spaces, in our own kind of home kind of environments. We can do both."
"Smith's chapter in Yours in Struggle, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships between Black and Jewish Women," acknowledged that addressing anti-Semitism set her up to look like a "woman of color overly concerned about 'white' issues." She confessed that her experiences with Jewish women had been "terrorizing" and admitted that she was anti-Semitic, largely because she had been brought up to be suspicious of whites. But Smith charged that in Jewish women's efforts to combat anti-Semitism, they had exercised racism toward black women. She urged black women to understand that they shared commonalities with Jewish women, included being oppressed by the white majority."
"My association with Aunt Lute Books began with Borderlands. I was in Minnesota for the Great Midwestern Book Show, on a panel with several writers discussing whether the writer should be an engaged writer. A couple of black male writers on the panel attacked Alice Walker and other black women writers, accusing them of emasculating black men in their writings. Then they turned on me, and the facilitator, who was inexperienced, didn't intervene. From the audience, Barbara Smith, writer and cofounder of Kitchen Table Press, spoke up on behalf of Alice Walker and all the other people. She was great."
"Insisting upon an integrated analysis and politics that recognizes that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, Barbara Smith observed that "the concept of simultaneity of oppression is... the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological contributions of Black feminist thought.""
"I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, June Jordan, bell hooks, etc."
"I became more firmly committed to feminism when I met Barbara Smith in 1975 at the Socialist Feminist Conference at Antioch College. We ran into each other as we were both leaving a session where some Marxist women were making quite homophobic statements about lesbians. I asked her, “Are you gay?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “So am I. This conference is sickening.” Anyway, I learned a great deal from Barbara in terms of her outspokenness and her courage to say, “I have such a deep commitment to feminism.” And as I began to meet other black feminists through Smith, my commitment became deeper as well."
"the legendary African-American feminist scholar Barbara Smith, founder of the Combahee River Collective and of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press."
"When contemporary feminist movement first began, feminist writings and scholarship by black women was groundbreaking. The writings of black women like Cellestine Ware, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate, define, speak to and against the glaring omissions in feminist work, the erasure of black female presence."
"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom? Barbara Smith, one of the founding members of the Combahee River Collective, is among the radical voices that have addressed these questions. Since the heyday of the civil rights movement, she has been telling white people that fighting racism is necessary for their own survival and liberation, not some act of philanthropy to help the downtrodden Negroes of the ghetto. She has been telling black activists that fighting homophobia is their issue because the policing of sexuality, no matter to whom it is directed, affects everyone. And she has been sharply critical of lesbian and movements for the narrowness of their political agendas. She knows what it will take to win freedom. "As a socialist and an alert Black woman, it is clear to me that it is not possible to achieve justice, especially economic justice, and equality under capitalism because capitalism was never designed for that to be the case. The assaults from the present system necessitate that most activists work for reforms, but those of us who are radicals understand that it is possible to do so at the very same time that we work for fundamental change-a revolution.""
"Black women writers have been around a long time, and they have suffered consistent inattention. Despite this reality, you hear from various sources that black women really have "it." We're getting jobs; we're getting this and that, supposedly. Yet we still constitute the lowest economic group in America. Meanwhile those of us who do not fit into the "establishment" have not been allowed a voice, and it was only with the advent of the women's movement-even though black women are in disagreement with many aspects of the women's movement-that black women began to demand a voice, as women and as blacks. I think any of us who are honest have to say this. As Barbara Smith says, "All the women were white and all the blacks were men, but some of us are still brave." Her book on black women's studies [Some of Us Are Brave], which she edited along with Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, is the first one on the subject."
"It will be six years next month since the vision of KTP (Kitchen Table Press) became a reality through the hard work of Barbara Smith and Cherrie Moraga and Myrna and the others."
"Women’s studies has long constructed black feminism as a form of discipline inflicted on the field and has imagined black feminists as a set of disciplinarians who quite literally whip the field into shape with their demands for a feminism that accounts for race generally, and for black women specifically. Of course, in an account where black women’s primary labor is to remedy—and perhaps even to save—the field from itself, ... once the field has effectively reconfigured itself, black feminism is imagined as no longer necessary or vital. Nowhere has this simplistic construction unfolded more visibly than in the context of intersectionality."
"The continued blindness to black feminism as an autonomous intellectual and political tradition that has ... done far more than ask to be “accounted for” and included in feminist theory is what enables women’s studies to continue representing black feminist theory as merely a critique."
"The emergence of the "post-" links both transnationalism and intersectionality to a kind of past tense. ... If the past tense of these terms is, in part, secured by "newer" work that challenges the hegemony of these terms, it is also secured through the fantasies of "political completion" that have swirled around the terms. ... The impossibility that any analytic can perform or produce "political completion" means that both intersectionality and transnationalism have been bemoaned and criticized for what they cannot ever accomplish. ... Because both analytics have been posited as correctives, both are imagined as exhaustible or finite. ... This conception of these analytics is at odds with the analytics themselves, both of which call for ongoing feminist engagements with questions of power, dominance, and subordination."
"We live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage while simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have a right to feel it. American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is of leigimizing and elevating white rage. American democracy uses calls for civility, equality, liberty and justice as smoke screens to obscure all the ways in which Black folks are treated uncivilly, unequally, illiberally, and unjustly as a matter of course."
"Treating Black feminism as primarily an anti-racist intervention within feminism continues to render it as a disruptive and temporary event, to be addressed, responded to, and moved on from, back to the regularly scheduled course of things."
"Our work is about supporting survivors by providing resources for healing and action. If in the course of that process a perpetrator is held accountable for their actions - so be it. But our goal is not to ‘take down’ individuals it’s to dismantle systems that give them cover."
"This movement is about making sure survivors have the resources to heal AFTER they’ve said #metoo, it’s about galvanizing a global community or survivors and advocates to do the work of interrupting sexual violence. It’s about protecting folks’ human dignity at all cost."
"There is inherent strength in agency. #MeToo, in a lot of ways, is about agency. It’s not about giving up your agency."
"Sexual violence happens on a spectrum so accountability has to happen on a spectrum. I don’t think that every single case of sexual harassment has to result in someone being fired; the consequences should vary. But we need a shift in culture so that every single instance of sexual harassment is investigated and dealt with. That’s just basic common sense."
"We have to talk about consent really early on. I’m a big champion of sex education. Because I think that the only way we can have lasting changes is if we change the way that young people think about each other. We start teaching respect and boundaries very early, you know kindergarten, pre-kindergarten. We should be talking about respect and boundaries. We should be talking about what it means to ask permission. We should be talking about those things."
", “everybody knew the ground rules. There was no mistaking where your place was.”"
"“They own you,”"
""They really put you through the grind.”"
""Still, you are expected to be intelligent, articulate, civil, kind, charitable, accepting of anything that comes.”"
"The house almost slid off the land to the south of Carville, hanging on to a spit for dear life. Secluded, as she liked it. Rundown, which didn't faze her; in fact, spoke in its favor. "You'd have to be crazy to live there," her friends at Carville said when she described the place. She hadn't had the heart to say at least she could come and go. Didn't wear a number for a name. To their minds, she didn't have very far to go crazy. Weren't her faithful visits evidence of an unbalanced soul? "Who in their right mind?" they asked each other."
"A blond, blue-eyed child, about three years old - no one will know her exact age, ever - is sitting in the clay of a country road, as if she and the clay are one, as if she is the first human, but she is not. (beginning of "transactions")"
"In her room she saw what she thought was the apparition of a knight dressed in silver, with a plumed helmet. The plume appeared black in the black and white of mid-night but could have been crimson or indigo. The figure did not vanish when she opened and shut her eyes and she reckoned - however much reckoning anyone can do in the dead of night, suddenly woken - he could not be inside her mind. He must be in her room. (beginning of "a public woman")"
"I pick up the New York Times sometime in 1992 and find your name. My heart catches. We are twenty years from a summer filled with each other, and now I hear you laugh, and I sound foolishly romantic, now death is around us. The first winnowing, a doctor said, cold. And if she is right, who will be left standing? This feels like a rout."
"Neptune. Long Branch. Navesink. Sea Girt. Manasquan. Atlantic Highlands. Pinball. Boardwalks. Salt-water taffy. "Don't dwell on the past so.""
"My grandmother's house. Small. In the middle of nowhere. The heart of the country, as she is the heart of the country. Mountainous, dark, fertile. One starting point."
""Don't you think the sound of men's voices raised in harmony is a holy sound? You know, like the Beach Boys." I was lying on the grass in the July sunlight, reading. The voice was coming from somewhere above my head."
"As children we had our seasons, apart from grown-up, growing seasons. Our own ways of dividing time, managing the elliptical motion of the Earth, life on a spinning planet. Our ways were grounded, uncelestial. Light years were beyond us; black holes not yet imagined. Our idea of a matter-destroying entity was the sewer under the city, stygian, dripping, where Floridian Godzillas survived on Norwegian rats. No, our seasons were set by the appearance of something in The Store of a Million Items, on Victory Boulevard, between the Mercury Cleaners and the Mill End Shop. The store was a postwar phenomenon, promising a bounty only available in America. Everything we loved was there; there we flocked. As close to infinity as we dared."
"As the leaves thinned the days shortened and the winter light cast everything cold. As the cold advanced quiet became the village - all sound was muffled. But for the fingers of ice cracking like gunshots in the night when the tree branches could no longer bear the weight of frozen water. (beginning of "American Time, American Light")"
"The sound of a jumprope came around in her head, softly, steadily marking time. Steadily slapping ground packed hard by the feet of girls. Franklin's in the White House. Jump/Slap. Talking to the ladies. Jump/Slap. Eleanor's in the outhouse. Jump/Slap. Eating chocolate babies. Jump/Slap. Noises of a long drawn-out summer's evening years ago. But painted in such rich tones she could touch it."
"A woman. A black woman. A black woman musician. A black woman musician who plays trumpet. A bitch who blows. A lady trumpet-player. A woman with chops. (beginning of "A Woman Who Plays Trumpet is Deported")"
"The island rose and sank. Twice. During periods in which history was recorded by indentations on rock and shell. This is a book about the time which followed on that time. As the island became a place where people lived. Indians. Africans. Europeans. (beginning of Chapter One)"
"In the beginning there had been two sisters-Nanny and Sekesu. Nanny fled slavery. Sekesu remained a slave. Some said this was the difference between the sisters. It was believed that all island children were descended from one or the other. All island people were first cousins."
"[He] was caught somewhere between the future and the past-both equal in his imagination. (Chapter Four)"
"I really don’t think about my writing in relationship to traditional genres. I have involved myself in finding my voice, unique to me, and that I see as a journey into my imagination without regard to the boundaries of genre. (2010)"
"The landscapes that are important to me are those that I have internalized. Those I carry within myself. Certainly my homeland of Jamaica, the photographic impressions of childhood, the witnessing of great natural beauty and great human tragedy. I always wanted to know why these two things coexisted—naive perhaps but then I was a child. (2010)"
"(What work do you find yourself returning to repeatedly that still has meaning or that the meaning deepens over time) MC: Anything by Virginia Woolf. But especially Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. (2010)"
"Most of my work has to do with revising: revising the written record, what passes as the official version of history, and inserting those lives that have been left out."
"I think that when you come from a culture that is not mainstream, when you're not expected to be a mainstream cultural person, you really can use that in a way to admit that you don't have that much loyalty to [the tradition] and that you can play with forms more. You can be much more experimental, you can mix styles up, you don't have to be linear, you don't have to be dichotomous, and believe it's either poetry or prose or whatever. You can really mix the media."
"what's good about this new book, I think, is that it's not just about the atrocities. It's about the history that's been lost to us of people who resisted, that there was a movement in this country of armed resistance. John Brown was financed by a black woman-she gave him thirty thousand dollars in gold to buy fifteen thousand rifles, which he did. At the Chatham convention where Harper's Ferry was being planned, the majority of people there were black and they came up with a constitution which demanded a black state within the United States. There was a really complicated revolutionary movement prior to the Civil War. What has come down to us is this notion of John Brown, this flaming, crazy, white man who was patriarchal and patronizing-and that's not the historical case at all. When he was leading the raid on Harper's Ferry, Mary Ellen Pleasant was down south dressed as a man trying to organize slaves to tell them there was going to be an insurrection and they were supposed to rise up."
"The Caribbean is a place where set categories don't really work well. There are too many permutations. People's personal experiences are very different."
"...it's like child abuse. You can't just cover it up and think it won't affect you. Even if you're not the person who's been abused, if it's your sister or your brother, it's going to come back to haunt you. It's going to have changed the environment that you grow up in and which you grow up into. You really have to contend with the history of this country, and the history of the world. (JR: And how do students of color respond to it?) MC: Some of them get very emotional and very upset, which, you know, is perfectly understandable. Some of them don't want to know about it. Some of them think it's shameful. One of the really important things is teaching that there was resistance. That is equally as important to me as the atrocity part. It's like the Holocaust: people did fight back. Yet we're never told that in school. It was something that was done to Jews or done to blacks and they collaborated in their own oppression. That's really not the case."
"Toni Morrison said, "The past is infinite." And it's true, especially if you are a writer of color. It is infinite, because so much of it that's been written in both fiction and nonfiction is a lie. It's almost like it behooves you to take that as your subject."
"...what would it mean for a woman to love another woman in the Caribbean? Not in the Mediterranean, not in a Paris bar, not on an estate in England. These are the representations of lesbians we have in much literature. But for Caribbean women to love each other is different. It's not Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, it's not Djuna Barnes or Natalie Barney, and it's not Sappho."
"I think that liberation has to begin with oneself."
"It's like amputating a piece of yourself to hate another human being for no reason."
"I think that the problem with America is the dissonance between the myth of this country and the reality. To have to contend all the time with unraveling the myth of America is very difficult."
"(What does Jamaica mean to you? You say you feel close through the writing.) Cliff: It is an incredibly provincial and oppressive place. There are things about it like the landscape, and some of the people, that I really love, but I hate the classism that I grew up with. I hate the system of oppressing other people of color. I hate pettiness, obsession with appearance, what things look like, how you appear to the outside world. It's such a waste of time. I hate the sexism, the extraordinary double standards. It's unbelievable! See, I experienced a lot of it as a negative place, but also it breaks my heart when I think what might have been."
"when I was growing up in Jamaica it was still a colony, and the teachers I had at Saint Andrews were, for the most part, white women or light-skinned Jamaican women who believed in white supremacy and English supremacy-the Empire. The Jamaicans were somehow to feel ashamed of Jamaica, and the English were horrendously superior. You felt inadequate. I don't know how else to put it. You were taught to worship something you could never really be a part of, and you were taught to be grateful to these people. But I always hated this. It was hard not to hate them."
"(Adisa: What changes have you witnessed since the 1960s? We're almost into another century. Is the conflict between blacks and whites, is racism still intense?) Cliff: I think it will never change until people realize where it comes from, and how deep it goes. You cannot eliminate it by changing a couple of laws which then are changed back, anyway. It's an existential thing. Racism goes very, very deep in people, and it's historically complex. I mean, it's a huge subject. I was teaching a course, the main theme of which was racism, how it is supported by the same thing that supports anti-semitism, that supports oppression of any group of people. People have simply got to, first of all, want to change, then take the steps to do so."
"My writing is very visual. And I find movies coming into it a lot, using movies as an idea, and the effects of movies. Growing up in Jamaica movies were one of the only contacts with the outside world for many people."
"The feminist movement allowed me certain things, like choosing to live alone, which was frowned on in the world in which I lived. Feminism for me was a way of looking in a mirror and seeing possibilities. It gave me support for my choices. One of these choices ultimately was to become a writer, which was something not at all encouraged in the world in which I grew up."
"(In the late 1960s, when you were coming of age, the feminist movement was beginning to gain momentum. What contact, if any, did you have with this movement, and how did you feel about a women's movement?) Cliff: The main contact I had was through reading. I was disillusioned by what had happened in the 1960s - for example, the crackdown on the Panthers and other progressive groups-so I went to England and tried to lose myself. My first real contact was through Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) and The Female Eunuch (1971) by Germaine Greer. But I've always been interested in women as historical figures. In my family I bucked against what was expected of me: marriage and children. So I found the feminist movement liberating, to discover that there were other women who thought like me. It meant I was not a freak."
"It's more of a life partnership… I don't own him. He doesn't own me. He has to be his own person first, and vice versa… Love is freedom."
"For every woman it's important that we recognize that we have the right to figure out what works for us personally. We don't have to do what everyone else is doing. If we are good, our family is going to be good."
"I really thought happiness had a lot to do with pleasure, and I realized that happiness is about peace."
"When you've walked through the darkness of your own heart and mind ... there is no shadow you fear."
"The ego will never fail to strangle the love out of one's heart if we allow it to take center stage in our relationships. Transferring our trust to our hearts from our egos is a painful process in learning HOW to love. BUT… through it all… when we finally get to the place where we can give and receive love in its most pure state… ego free… it is only ever… beauty."
"I've always believed a woman's superpower is how deep she can love, you know? And one of the things growing up in Baltimore, I grew up around a lot of Black women that didn't have, necessarily, resources to give, right? But they had their strength and they had their love to offer."
"You gotta trust who you're with, and at the end of the day, I'm not here to be anybody's watcher. I'm not his watcher. He's a grown man. I trust that the man that Will is is a man of integrity. HE's got all the freedom in the world, and as long as Will can look at himself in the mirror and be OK, I'm good."
"If you really want to know, I'm thankful for the Hollywood scrutiny, that that's my problem. There are mothers out there losing their sons, their husbands, their daughters. I'm blessed. So scrutinize me. I'll take that any day over what the majority of my people are dealing with on a daily basis. I dare not complain."
"A man can CHOOSE to belong to someone. And if he does...he is considered noble. A woman is told she MUST belong to someone or...she is not worthy."
"We mere mortal women are worthy simply because we exist!,"
"if we so CHOOSE to bond with someone from this space … we will erect monumental love and give birth to treasures."
"I think everybody's life is their own work of art and then we have many pieces within it. I have a lot of ideas around marriage and I think it can be one of the most powerful dynamics."
"You cannot make a cake with all sugar. In one lifetime, we've lived about 20...If I had to say what kind of art piece our union is, I would say it is a tapestry."
"so that's what I'm really playing with right now. And I love the juxtaposition of going from beauty to rough, the balance of both."
"Having the courage to be with all that we are, even in the face of the disappointment and the anger and resentment that comes with the breaking of the romantic idea around the feminine," she explained, "part of the freedom and part of the empowerment of women is being able to withstand that."