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.

Writing and the hope of writing pulls me back from the edges of despair. I believe insanity and despair are at times one and the same.

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.

Given the way universities work to reinforce and perpetuate the status quo, the way knowledge is offered as commodity, Women's Studies can easily become the place where revolutionary feminist thought and feminist activism are submerged or made secondary to the goals of academic careerism

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.