African American Feminists

"“They own you,”"

", “everybody knew the ground rules. There was no mistaking where your place was.”"

"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."

"There is inherent strength in agency. #MeToo, in a lot of ways, is about agency. It’s not about giving up your agency."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"the legendary African-American feminist scholar Barbara Smith, founder of the Combahee River Collective and of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"("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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter."

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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 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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."