I can be critical of Beyoncé and yet also appreciate aspects of her power and representation. I can especially critique the way white supremacist aesthetics more often than not informs her presentation of self and yet still acknowledge her beauty.

To me, a woman can't be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness.

We fear that evaluating our needs and then carefully choosing partners will reveal that there is no one for us to love. Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all. What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.

When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.

Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love.

When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60's and early 70's, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors - bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother - to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who'd gone before us.

I think it's crazy for us to think that people don't understand what's being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in time.