21st Century African American Women

"How is it that anyone could suggest that, in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?"

"Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world."

"My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” (Laughs.) You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."

"What an honor it is to be here in Ghana and on the continent of Africa."

"I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit."

"I think that, to be very honest with you, I — I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believed that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled."

"So, it’s one thing to say “there should be accountability,” but when we think about and define “accountability” based on bad actors and bad deeds, part of our system of justice tells us that, yes, there should be serious, swift, and severe consequence, but also we must look to those who were harmed and ask, “Are we doing enough to allow them the ability to recover from that harm?”"

"Students who simply wanted to better their prospects in life and instead found themselves taken advantage of by a scam that took their money and gave them nothing in return except heartache."

"You know, the bottom line is this. On this issue of mental health, you know, one way to think of it is this: If you knew someone who broke their arm, you would help them. You would make sure they went to the hospital to get a cast. And after they came home — well, on their way home, you’d probably open the door for them, you’d help them when they got home to get the support they need to heal through the point that they are feeling pain and then just need to heal. We have to do the same when it comes to mental health. I think for too long our system has failed to understand the significance of this. I think for too long, when we think about healthcare, we act as though the body just starts from the neck down, instead of understanding we also need to address healthcare from the neck up: mental health. So, if you are struggling, please know you are not alone, that you are seen, and that you deserve to receive the help you desire and the help you need. The President and I are fighting to expand mental healthcare for all Americans because everyone should have access to the support they need to thrive."

"[T]his burnout issue existed even before the pandemic. And I’d like to recognize and thank the unions who are here who have long been a leading voice on this issue. And, you know, the term “burnout” was originally coined in the 1970s by a psychologist to describe the mental repercussions he experienced while working in a clinic. The choice to dedicate your life to helping people is a noble one, but too often it requires that you sacrifice so much of yourself. In 2019, more than half of all healthcare workers reported feeling burnt out. And that was — again, that was before the pandemic. Each of you made enormous sacrifices to save lives under impossible conditions, which is why President Joe Biden and I are fighting to transform how mental health is understood, perceived, and treated for all Americans and, in particular, for our health workers. You deserve access to the mental healthcare that you need. You deserve support and understanding when you are struggling. And you deserve working conditions that support your mental health."

"The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, brought increased attention to the mental health of workers in our healthcare system. And we have asked so much of you over the course of these last two-plus years. Some of you held the hands of those who were dying on behalf of their loved ones. All of you worked around the clock long before we understood how COVID-19 spread or what it did to the body. And before you were even vaccinated or had protective equipment — the kind you needed — you were still here doing this work around the clock. You spent hour after hour, many in a windowless room, unable to speak about how you were feeling or only being able to speak with a small group who truly could understand what you were going through. But you did it nonetheless. So there is an urgent need that we have, I believe, to address all of this and to address, of course, what has resulted: the stress, the burnout, the mental health challenges that you experienced most recently because of the pandemic."

"I believe that the work that you all do to help the children and families of this community and of our country is truly remarkable work. For many of the people who come through the doors of this hospital, they spend time here that is probably one of the most difficult times in their lives. And as doctors, as nurses, as staff, you provide life-saving medical care. And you also offer comfort at a time when it is most needed. Your compassion, I truly believe, is light in the midst of darkness, often. And you do so much to take care of your patients in their time of need, which is why I’m here to say we need to do a better job of taking care of you."

"So I am here because this is a community in the Mississippi Delta that has a long history of being part of America's history, um, including having the needs that should be met."

"So, let me say this: This is an issue that Josi actually highlighted in terms of the importance of this. The Governor and I and we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time. Right? The significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children and what that means to the future of our nation, depending on whether or not they have the resources they need to achieve their God-given talent."

"We also recognize just as it has been in the United States, for Jamaica, one of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic. So to that end, we are announcing today also that we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential to, I believe, what is necessary to strengthen not only the issue of public health but also the economy."

"Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine so basically that's wrong."

"Within the context then of the fact that the window is still opening, although, open, although it is absolutely narrowing, but within the context of a diplomatic path still being open, the deterrence effect, we believe, has merit."

"[I]f you want to figure out how to get across town to some restaurant you heard is great, you usually do Google to figure out where it is so that's simply about giving people, right, a mechanism by which they can locate something that they need."

"We have twenty thousand sites where people can go, and I urge people to, you can Google it or go onto any search engine and find out where free testing and the free testing site is available."

"It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down. And so right now we know we still have a number of people that, that is in the millions of Americans who have not been vaccinated, and could be vaccinated, and we are urging them to get vaccinated because it will save their life."

"And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making."

"I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border."

"Injustice is a root cause of migration. And in particular, it is causing the people of the region to leave their homes involuntarily."

"I look forward to working with the many, many talented attorneys in the district attorney's office"

"We have to stay woke. Like, everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you're the wokest or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke"

"It is morally wrong, and when we all sing happy tunes and sing 'Merry Christmas' and wish each other 'Merry Christmas'. These children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak 'Merry Christmas'? How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas, they don't know if they will be here in a matter of days, weeks and months. Since September 5, over 12,000 have lost their status... And for that reason, we must get this done, and we must get it done before the end of this year. No January, no February, no March, now."

"ICE raids across the country have torn mothers apart from their children. The raids lack transparency, spread fear, and harm public safety. Breaking up families and separating kids from their parents is wrong. We can keep America safe without being callous. We must do better."

"As unacceptable as this problem is -- I know we can fix it. In San Francisco, we threatened the parents of truants with prosecution, and truancy dropped 32 percent. So, we are putting parents on notice."

"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).”"

"As Kimberlé Crenshaw has emphasized, women need to "tell their stories, to document, explain, and theorize about the interlocking themes, meanings, and oppressions of their lives, restoring what has been invisible and erased so as to articulate "what difference the difference makes.""

"Critical legal studies scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 to describe how different power structures interact in the lives of minorities, especially black women, causing "compound and overlapping" discrimination. For Crenshaw, a key idea was that each group needed to go beyond critique to consistently explain its own experiences and create its own theories, "so it's incorporated within feminism and within anti-racism." The term immediately gained a toehold in the field of feminist and critical studies, but for the most part, Jewish women's position was excluded from consideration in relation to the interlocking issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality that framed this discourse."

"It is not necessary to believe that a political consensus to focus on the lives of the most disadvantaged will happen tomorrow in order to recenter discrimination discourse at the intersection. It is enough, for now, that such an effort would encourage us to look beneath the prevailing conceptions of discrimination and to challenge the complacency that accompanies belief in the effectiveness of this framework. By so doing, we may develop language which is critical of the dominant view and which provides some basis for unifying activity. The goal of this activity should be to facilitate the inclusion of marginalized groups for whom it can be said: “When they enter, we all enter.”"

"If any real efforts are to be made to free Black people of the constraints and conditions that characterize racial subordination, then theories and strategies purporting to reflect the Black community’s needs must include an analysis of sexism and patriarchy. Similarly, feminism must include an analysis of race if it hopes to express the aspirations of non-white women. Neither Black liberationist politics nor feminist theory can ignore the intersectional experiences of those whom the movements claim as their respective constituents. In order to include Black women, both movements must distance themselves from earlier approaches in which experiences are relevant only when they are related to certain clearly identifiable causes (for example, the oppression of Blacks is significant when based on race, of women when based on gender). The praxis of both should be centered on the life chances and life situations of people who should be cared about without regard to the source of their difficulties."

"Unable to grasp the importance of Black women’s intersectional experiences, not only courts, but feminist and civil rights thinkers as well have treated Black women in ways that deny both the unique compoundedness of their situation and the centrality of their experiences to the larger classes of women and Blacks. Black women are regarded either as too much like women or Blacks and the compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective experiences of either group or as too different, in which case Black women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas. While it could be argued that this failure represents an absence of political will to include Black women, I believe that it reflects an uncritical and disturbing acceptance of dominant ways of thinking about discrimination. Consider first the definition of discrimination that seems to be operative in antidiscrimination law: Discrimination which is wrongful proceeds from the identification of a specific class or category; either a discriminator intentionally identifies this category, or a process is adopted which somehow disadvantages all members of this category."

"Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. ... I am suggesting that Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination — the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women — not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women. Black women’s experiences are much broader than the general categories that discrimination discourse provides. Yet the continued insistence that Black women’s demands and needs be filtered."

"Trump is an unreflective beneficiary of every sort of white privilege on offer, from his inherited fortune to his mass-media celebrity to his ability to lie with utter impunity about his career, his finances, and his easily documented record of public statements. If Barack Obama had committed but one of the transgressions Trump reveled in during his 2016 presidential run—deriding John McCain's war record, to take a comparatively minor instance—he would have suffered a torrent of righteous white moralizing that would have been unprecedented even in a country renowned for its righteous white moralizing. And if he'd been caught on tape bragging about a celebrity-enabled history of sexual assault—well, suffice it to say that it would have been a high-tech lynching on a scale that Clarence Thomas could scarcely begin to imagine."

"After examining the doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework, I will discuss how it contributes to the of in feminist theory and in politics. I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast."

"The refusal to allow a multiply-disadvantaged class to represent others who may be singularly-disadvantaged defeats efforts to restructure the distribution of opportunity and limits remedial relief to minor adjustments within an established hierarchy. Consequently, “bottom-up” approaches, those which combine all discriminatees in order to challenge an entire employment system, are foreclosed by the limited view of the wrong and the narrow scope of the available remedy. If such “bottom-up” intersectional representation were routinely permitted, employees might accept the possibility that there is more to gain by collectively challenging the hierarchy rather than by each discriminatee individually seeking to protect her source of privilege within the hierarchy. But as long as doctrine proceeds from the premise that employment systems need only minor adjustments, opportunities for advancement by disadvantaged employees will be limited. Relatively privileged employ- ees probably are better off guarding their advantage while jockeying against others to gain more. As a result, Black women — the class of employees which, because of its intersectionality, is best able to challenge all forms of discrimination — are essentially isolated and often required to fend for themselves."

"To Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, and Audre Lorde for your lessons on intersectionality and the beauty of Black girl magic. This book would not be possible without you."

"The shift that's occurred this time around "wasn't by happenstance," Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an activist and a writer, told me, nor is it only the product of video evidence. "It has been the work of generations of Black activists, Black thinkers, and Black scholars"-people like Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander, and others-"that has gotten us here. Six years ago, people were not using the phrase 'systemic racism' beyond activist circles and academic circles. And now we are in a place where it is readily on people's lips, where folks from CEOs to grandmothers up the street are talking about it, reading about it, researching on it, listening to conversations about it.""

"When it comes to climate action, it's abundantly clear that we will not build the power necessary to win unless we embed justice-particularly racial but also gender and economic justice-at the center of our low-carbon policies. Intersectionality, the term coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the only path forward. We cannot play "my crisis is more urgent than your crisis"-war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race."

"Kim Crenshaw's work has helped us to center on the burdens placed on people based on their social locations, which create new suffering."

"Food in these poems is a connection to the natural world, to what Lucille Clifton calls "the bond of live things everywhere" in her poem, "cutting greens.""

"One of my favorite poets is Lucille Clifton, author of a good number of fine books, including Blessing the Boats, Quilting, and Two-Headed Woman."

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."

"Lucille stayed late, singing the song of/carrying on, admitting the truth.../"Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect/in thin ways that last and last . . ."/Lucille gave everything she had."

"I would also suggest that everyone read the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a black heterodox Christian woman who seems to me the most important spiritual poet in America today."

"Lucille Clifton is able to do something difficult: take the strengths of poetry and apply them in such a way that you have first-rate prose."

"(The book that...shaped my worldview:) Lucille Clifton’s poetry collection Good Woman. I have long considered her the secret godmother of my writing since I was 15, and this was the first collection of hers I owned."

"One thing poetry teaches us, if anything, is that everything is connected…There is so much history that we have not validated."