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When I dare to be powerful--to use my strength in the service of my vision--then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

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I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.......more

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I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

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There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

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I seek no favor untouched by blood.

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Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretch...more

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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house

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Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of differ...more

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For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable ...more

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It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

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As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who...more

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If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, ...more

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Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at...more

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The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our worl...more

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I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poe...more