While the patriarchal boys in hip-hop crew may talk about keeping it real, there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip-hop.
I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go.
While it is positive for young black males and females to learn discipline and self-responsibility, those attitudes, values, and habits of being can be taught with pedagogical strategies that are liberatory, that do not rely on coercive control and punishment to reinforce positive behavior.
For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.
To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.
The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.
Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice.
As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.
What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe.
If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.
Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being.
Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.
When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo.
Honesty and openness are always the foundation of insightful dialogue.
Whether we’re talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is.
Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.
I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.