The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.
But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That’s what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it’s the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.
In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.
I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.
Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.
Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
My fear of anger taught me nothing.
One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.
For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives.
I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?
Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.
I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.