There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard and knowing / you are not being heard / noticed only by others / not heard for the same reason.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

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

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

I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

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.