Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

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.

Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.

There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.

Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.

One of the things that we must do as teachers is twirl around and around, and find out what works with the situation that we're in. Our models might not work. And that twirling, changing, is part of the empowerment.

Remember, care is a dimension of love, but simply giving care does not mean we are loving.