I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.
When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.
Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are – to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love.
Whenever domination is present, love is lacking.
Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionize their consciousness.
What’s so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy.
I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.
Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase “Black feminism”.
A good teacher is someone who can help you to get back to a teacher within.
A very hurting thing for Black Americans – to feel that we can’t love our enemies. People forget what a great tradition we have as African-Americans in the practice of forgiveness and compassion. And if we neglect that tradition, we suffer.
Justice is possible without equality, I believe, because of compassion and understanding. If I have compassion, then if I have more than you, which is unequal, I will still do the just thing by you.
To me, a woman can’t be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness.
If you’re in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination – even though you understand it intersectionally – you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that’s what is needed to change the situation.
My focus has always been on the work – that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That’s where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.
I feel that I have many real students whom I have not met. Many are in cloisters and they never get out. Others are in prison. But in many cases they practice the teachings much better than those who meet me every day.
If Black women stand strong and our commitment is to ending domination I know that I’m supporting Black males, Black children male and female Black elderly because the bottom line is the struggle to end domination in all its forms.
The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women’s studies classes and said, “Black women have always worked.”
Love is first and foremost exemplified by action – by practice – not solely by feeling.
One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.