I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance.

The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.

Of all the definitions of love that abound in our universe, a special favorite of mine is... “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”

I think the invitation offered the non-black reader is to join us in this expression of our familiarity and via that joining, come to understand that when black people come together to celebrate and rejoice in black critical thinking, we do so not to exclude or to separate, but to participate more fully in world community. However, we must first be able to dialogue with one another, to give one another subject-to-subject recognition that is an act of resistance that is part of the decolonizing, anti-racist process.

Loving friendships provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected.

Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.