So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.

And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

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.

Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.