Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.

There are no honest poems about dead women.

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

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 us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.