Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

...my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

… our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.